Grief is the price we pay for love: that is the message at the heart of You Will Not Have My Hate, a moving true story of tragedy and healing based on the memoir of the same name written by French radio journalist, widower and single father Antoine Leiris. On November 13, 2015, the author’s wife Hélène Muyal-Leiris was murdered by Islamist terrorists while attending a concert by American rockers Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, one of 130 victims killed in a series of co-ordinated attacks across the city.
Three days after the massacre, a devastated Leiris wrote an impassioned Facebook post addressed to his wife’s killers. “On Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate,” he began. Refusing to give in to fear and hatred, he argued, was a victory against the terrorists. Even his motherless child, Melvil, would not sink to their level. “For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom,” Leiris vowed..
The post went viral with over 250,000 shares, transforming Leiris into an overnight media star. Largely against his will, he became a poster boy for the grieving loved ones left behind by the Paris atrocities, and for heroic resilience in the face of unimaginable horror. He later chronicled the events which inspired this outburst in a best-selling book about his wrenching loss and slow recovery. German director Kilian Riedhof’s bio-drama, which world premiered at Locarno Film Festival last week, brings that memoir to the big screen.
You Will Not Have My Hate is a deluxe tear-jerker made with noble intentions and anchored by solid performances. Perhaps unavoidably, it also plays as something of a one-note glumfest on screen. The florid, heightened, lyrical language that Leiris deployed in his memoir inevitably gets lost in translation. While the book reads like poetry, the film plays like prose. Another recent true-story screen drama about the Bataclan massacre, Isaki Lacuesta’s One Year, One Night (2021), tackled similar material with more subtlety and complexity – though in fairness, that film is about survivors, not fatalities. Riedhof’s respectful adaptation will probably do brisk business when it opens in French theatres in November, close to the seventh anniversary of the attacks. Outside France, in countries where this story has a lower media profile and less immediate emotional force, audience potential will be more limited.
You Will Not Have My Hate mostly takes place in the Parisian apartment where Antoine (a soulful, haunted Pierre Deladonchamps) shares a warm, happy, romantic family nest with wife Helene (Camelia Jordana) and their young son Melvil (superbly played by a little girl, Zoe Ioro, an inspired but unobtrusive piece of gender-blind casting). Giddy with excitement, Helene leaves for the Bataclan show, but never returns. Antoine first hears hazy hints about the attacks on social media, scrappy news reports and maddening misinformation. When Helene does not answer any of his messages, he becomes steadily more desperate, eventually leaving Melvil with a babysitter while he frantically tours the city’s hospitals looking for proof that she is dead or alive. Only hours later is the worst confirmed.
The film follows Antoine through various stages of grief, denial and rage, including painfully real dreamlike visions of his dead wife. Meanwhile he must make an extra day-to-day effort with Melvil as a newly single dad, a steep learning curve that throws up a few tragicomic moments. Both book and film are refreshingly honest enough to show Antoine at his worst, throwing tantrums over funeral plans, clashing with Helene’s family over “ownership” of the tragedy, reacting rudely to empathetic offers of help, and so on. But it comes as zero surprise when he emerges from his hellish ordeal a better person, and the film ends on a sunny sense of calm closure, which feels soothing yet slightly glib.
Leiris was initially reluctant to sell the much-coveted film rights to You Will Not Have My Hate. But he relented after meeting Riedhof and his team, which includes Toni Erdmann (2016) director Maren Ade as producer, apparently satisfied that Germans would have more healthy emotional distance from the story than French film-makers. His sole condition was that the film would not dramatise the Bataclan attack itself. Sure enough, all bloodsded happens off-screen, and the killers are never seen. At one point in the plot, Antoine steels himself to watch a real amateur video of the attack posted on YouTube, but he can only endure a few seconds.
While it feels unkind, maybe even unethical, to criticise such a sincere depiction of a recent real-life tragedy, You Will Not Have My Hate is mawkish and soapy in places. Riedhof is rightly faithful to the facts, but his inexperience as a director often lets him down, bringing scant psychological depth or aesthetic flair to the table. It is never quite clear why this intensely personal story needed to be re-told in cinematic form as a piece of commercial entertainment. That said, in it most stirring moments, this emotionally charged saga serves as a tribute to the victims of the Bataclan and beyond, and an uplifting lesson in the power of love.
Director: Kilian Riedhof
Screenplay: Kilian Riedhof, Jan Braren, Marc Bloebaum, Stephanie Kalfon, based on the book by Antoine Leiris
Main cast: Pierre Deladonchamps, Zoe Iorio, Camelia Jordana, Thomas Mustin, Christelle Cornil, Anne Azoulay, Farida Rahouadj, Yannick Choirat
Producers: Janine Jackowski, Jonas Dornbach, Maren Ade
Cinematography: Manuel Dacosse
Editing: Andrea Mertens
Music: Peter Hinderthuer
Production company: Komplizen Film (Germany)
World sales: Beta Cinema
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
In French
102 minutes
