“I knew that my mother had been terribly disappointed by my lack of musical genius, because she had never mentioned it again in front of me, and in her house, which, it must be said, was so often lacking in tact, such reserve was a sure sign of deep, secret grief. Her own artistic ambitions had never been fulfilled and she was counting on me to fulfill them.”. In 1960, Romain Gary published The promise of dawn. The 379-page autobiographical novel looks back on the youth of the French writer. He particularly recounts his unique relationship with his mother., a woman who loved him more than anything and for whom he sometimes had mixed feelings, like any child. Monday, April 10, 2023, France 3 broadcasts the film adaptation of the novel by Eric Barbier.
“A great book that sheds light on this elusive personality”
The promise of dawn is a book that director Eric Barbier (Le Serpent, Petit Pays, Zodi and Tehu, brothers of the desert) remembered for a long time. Of the author he says that “Gary is double, triple, multiple. Ambassador, filmmaker, novelist often hiding under various pseudonyms, he is Polish, Russian, French, a Jew whose mother rushes to the pope at the slightest concern and who regularly describes himself as oriental, when it’s not Tatar… The Promise of Dawn, which I first read in high school, is a great book that sheds tremendous light on this elusive personality.”. Not to mention that, as he explains in the press kit, this book is “a picaresque tale, an initiatory adventure novel that retraces 20 years of the life of Romain Gary and his mother. They are tossed about from adventure to adventure, from country to country. Their life is a series of seized or missed opportunities, of encounters, of happy or unlucky coincidences. It’s a flurry of situations.”. To transpose such a multiplicity of elements on the screen was not an easy task. The director knew it.
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“In The Promise of Dawn, the true and the false mingle”
Published in more than a million copies worldwide, Romain Gary’s novel is an intimate dive into a complex family relationship. The story of his life revolves around his mother, Mina Owczyńska. It was surrounded by her love that he built himself and grew, trying his best to realize the dreams she had never been able to achieve. However, for the rest of his life, the author will have great difficulty in finding such unconditional love elsewhere. “The raw material of the novel is beyond all comprehension and we are confronted with a multiplicity of scenes that make you dizzy. We had to find a script form to preserve the essence of the novel while reducing it by two thirds”explains Eric Barbier. “Gary has structured his book in three main acts: childhood in Eastern Europe, youth in France, and coming of age with the war, but he goes back and forth in time, he links events from different eras between them to analyze, develop certain themes, ideas and reflections on his past. The process is very beautiful and works well in literature, but it is not transposable as is to the cinema”, he adds. Especially since it points out that “in The Promise of Dawn, the true and the false, the real and the imaginary mix there all the time. It is an autobiographical story where memory is sublimated, memories reconstructed”. To preserve this essence so specific to the author, the director has therefore chosen to integrate a voice-over to accompany the interpretations of Pierre Niney and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the title roles.
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