Adèle Haenel, in collaboration with Gisèle Vienne, Aim True, L’Arche, 21 August 2026, 192 pages, €17.
Adèle Haenel was twelve years old when Christophe Ruggia cast her in The Devils. In April 2026, the Paris Court of Appeal convicted the filmmaker to five years in prison, two of them suspended, for sexual assaults committed on her between 2001 and 2004. A two-time César Award winner, the actress left cinema in 2023. Her first book reconstructs, as an investigator, the disappearance of the child she once was, and France Télévisions has just removed from replay part of the program where she hosted it.
Summer 2001 and the Crime Scene
On the set of a popular house, two children play an inspector and a ghost among false cobwebs, and the ghost, kneeling, begins to sob before astonished parents. At snack time, a father receives a small note in which a stranger seeks a ten-to-fifteen-year-old girl for a director’s film. The tremor of the child has just acquired a market value.
The book, published by L’Arche, alternates numbered screenplay sequences with chapters in which Adèle Haenel, an investigative actress, revisits these images as if diving into the archives of closed cases. She reconstructs the setting of the apartment where the director received the child each week, door shut, sofa, coffee table, Fingers in white chocolate, and replays the scene until the mechanism is dismantled. Five reconstructions of crime scenes borrow their titles from the Natural History Museum: capture, taxidermy, display under glass, extinction, inlay.
The trap had its own tongue. The director demanded a just performance from the child, and the title reverses the injunction, since the girl commanded to play fairly becomes the adult who holds the camera’s gaze. In the realm of “true truth,” the natural nature of an eleven-year-old had to unfold before the camera, at the cost of six months of a work labeled free training. Each gift deepened a debt that the child repaid with her body, until filmed nudity, until that pane of real glass pierced in a single take, from which she emerges bloodied. The author refuses to give the man his proper name and calls him “the director,” or “the man with the toad’s smile” from a tale where the child’s pet name my little one turns into a swarm of fleas bursting from her mouth in place of a scream.
A scrap of paper dated January 13, 2003 concentrates the distress of those years. The child insults herself in capitals with a ballpoint pen, to utter the words that family silence let wander and spared her parents the pain of pronouncing, in a house where everyone masked blindness and where a dazzled father had launched his daughter as a product.
The Girl on the Bench and the Flooded Corridors
The narrative then leaves the apartment for a suburban park. A teenage girl in a hoodie brings chips to a boy, an earbud in her ear crackling with Bring Me to Life, who criticizes her approach and then slides his hand under her shirt. She goes along with it, a can of soda in hand, determined to keep her drink upright. Adèle Haenel calls this survivor “the girl on the bench.” The text assigns the child to the masculine and the bench girl to the feminine, and this shift from one pronoun to another marks the assignment even in grammar.
Joy bursts in during a philosophy class when a student named Grace defines the discipline as the art of asking a question where certainty reigned, a phrase the author attributes to Roland Barthes. The class becomes a forest, then an ocean, and Grace tells the bench girl that she has endured a similar violence. Haenel derives from this a proposition of great clarity—the trauma’s cogito, where the feeling of nonexistence proves that a subject remains to experience it. Depression here becomes a hole in human relationships, a climate phenomenon more than a fault of the person.
Before Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, whose hero advances through flooded corridors, a friend, Marina, articulates the theory that governs the whole work. If the walls of the labyrinth are erased in postproduction, the character who threads around them seems mad, when his journey adheres to a world hidden from sight. Haenel then rereads her films as archives of a search—from the synchronized swimming of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, where smiles float above the legs that struggle, to Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who shifts from object to subject.
The Grandmother as an Authoritative and Literary Figure
The center of this arrangement is Jazia, a magistral figure who explodes the archetypes of the “Algerian grandmother.” Leïla Marouane complicates this character by granting her an unexpected meta-literary dimension. Jazia is not only the ogress who manipulates police and officers with her gold coins; she is also an author. The novel stages a war of narratives. Jazia dictates her own novel on an old Remington, rewriting the family history to her own glory, inventing for herself a past of intellectual resistance quoting Sartre and Marx, while exercising an inexorable domestic tyranny. “Colossus with feet of clay,” she embodies the ambivalence of a generation that proclaims literary modernity while locking social cages. Her rivalry with the writings of others (Massi’s letters, Rose’s journals) structures the dramatic tension of the work.
The Pedagogy of Cruelty and What Theatre Can Do
The final movement returns violence to the foreground. The 2020 César Awards appear on the television of a fictional family, where a girl abused in childhood by her trainer hears her father reproach her for having played Lolita. The trophy for directing goes to a man whom the text identifies with a thirty-word circumlocution linked by dashes, after which small bodies rise and leave the room, silhouettes among which Adèle Haenel is visible.
The next chapter names what has been at stake: a pedagogy of cruelty, in the words of anthropologist Rita Segato. The ovation taught that a child’s life weighs little compared to the glory of a powerful man, and the departure of the woman whom the author herself calls la vachette, endowed with the sense of improvisation because it is her métier, returns the light toward a room suddenly legible, homogeneous by gender and skin color. A sentence carries the book’s burden: “Sexual assaults did not cancel me; they created me and destroyed me.” The aim thus becomes to imagine a society rather than to restore an order.
Under the title What Theatre Can Do, where Baruch Spinoza’s question about what a body can do resonates, Adèle Haenel restores to performers their status as authors, whereas the director reserved art for the trainer who applauds when the lion leaps through the hoop. The text, the publisher notes, is the fruit of a long artistic friendship with director Gisèle Vienne, and it preserves the record of its own missteps. “Loving is something one learns,” Grace had said, and the inquiry leads to a definition of love through friendship, which takes back from the predator that alibi word present on all crime scenes.
On 9 September 2026, in her op-ed for La Grande Librairie, Adèle Haenel connected the denial surrounding sexual violence to the denial surrounding Gaza, accusing Israel of genocide and France of complicity. The following day, France Télévisions removed the replay of the entire program as a precaution in the name of pluralism, before its head of channels, Stéphane Sitbon-Gomez, cleared those remarks of any fault. Augustin Trapenard defended his “cartes blanches.” The book had described this mechanism from its very first scene, where a child explains that conventions are used to silence, and public television offered the administrative version—a censorship labeled as precaution. The column is titled Droit dans les yeux (Right in the Eyes), a phrase the author had already used to describe the gaze cast upon the world. In L’Arche’s collection, titled Des écrits pour la parole, Aim True opens in the gray crust of silence the electric-green tear that the phantom child had already worn on her lips. Behind the scenes that day, the child testified she had cried for her character, and a quarter of a century later, with a precision that honors its title, Adèle Haenel restores her tears to her.
The article Aim True, Adèle Haenel recounts the childhood stolen by cinema first appeared on Mare Nostrum.
