'Je Suis Charlie': Review

Je Suis Charlie (L’humour à mort) zips by featuring footage of the slaughtered cartoonists of French satirical weekly paper Charlie Hebdo when they were radiantly, mischievously alive and adds recent, touching and informative interviews with staffers who survived the January 7, 2015 bloodbath. Father and son docu-makers Daniel and Emmanuel Leconte have now-poignant material left over from father Daniel’s 2008 documentary It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks, a lively portrait of the editorial routine at the publication’s offices and the brouhaha that resulted when the paper was dragged into French court for alleged racism in re-publishing the infamous caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that originated in Demark.

Testimony by surviving individuals is heart-wrenching and genuine food for thought

The film’s French title is a pun on l’amour à mort — “love you to death” — that translates loosely as “humor you to death.”

Anyone interested in creative freedom and the exercise of free speech in a touchy world should find this of interest, although the pace may be challengingly swift for viewers with scant prior knowledge of the stature several of the slain artists and writers held in the collective conscious of contemporary France.

Having grown up with the underdog-championing Charlie cartoonists as a constant presence in the media stretching back decades in multiple publications and on TV and radio, French viewers know what an embarrassing number of commentators abroad do not: to wit, that calling Charlie Hebdo “racist” is as ludicrously mistaken as declaring that The Queen hates corgis.

The interviewees from the 2008 documentary appear “eight years younger” in the words of the borderline-strident voice-over narration. After running a cartoon in 2002 completely unaware that it was apparently forbidden in Islam to depict the Prophet, the paper received some 900 e-mails demanding an apology.  But the paper’s stance, then and now, is that any artistic mockery targets “extremists, not Muslims.” (And indeed, the French courts ruled in favor of Charlie in the 2007 suit for racism and defamation.)

What this documentary does a particularly trenchant job of exposing is the perverse backlash that followed the stunning public demonstrations of solidarity in the streets of Paris and abroad. No sooner had world leaders marched side by side on 11 January than a handful of essayists ventured to say that the Charlie folks somehow “had it coming” and should have been more sensitive to the possibility that their work might offend potential terrorists with an ideological axe to grind. In other words, if  a few years after their offices were fire-bombed (in 2011) they got themselves killed for refusing to self-censor, then they have only themselves to blame. Je Suis Charlie shows just enough of what went into putting together the post-slaughter issue, which ended up with a print run of over seven million copies and prompted pre-dawn lines at newsstands in hopes of snagging a copy.

Although still grieving, interviewees  are well-spoken and true to their convictions. Their refusal to back in the wake of unspeakable tragedy is convincingly presented as the most potent possible tribute to slain comrades. Surviving cartoonist Coco recounts the harrowing experience of being forced by the two gunmen to punch in the office door security code with a Kalashnikov (AK-47) in her back.

Testimony by surviving individuals is heart-wrenching and genuine food for thought.  Fall-out includes a Muslim high school teacher compelled to resign from his academic position after publishing an essay calling on ordinary Muslims to denounce Islamic extremism. Author and historian Elisabeth Badinter speaks up about the cagey reluctance to define anti-Semitic attacks as anti-Semitic because “then you have to open the can of worms of asking who, exactly, wants to kill Jews?”

Hit or miss humour can be extremely funny, athough some of the drawings may go by too fast for non-French-speaking viewers to appreciate the artwork plus grasp translations of captions or dialogue bubbles.

The film is dedicated at the outset to the 17 cited-by-name individuals who were murdered in the attacks of 7, 8 and 9 January of this year. After seeing how very much they meant to colleagues, family and ordinary citizens, any normally constituted viewer will feel their loss.