Hospitality and Violence: Parasites and Hosts in Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol and Karim Dridi

Abstract

Hospitality, with its varying rites, its local and cultural variations - whether itis considered a virtue or an obligation - always involves welcoming an 'other', a stranger, 'a foreign body' into one's own space. This has its inherent dangers as there is always the possibility that the guest will turn on the host, exploiting the host's generosity or attempting to usurp the host's position. As Myriam Roman and Anne Tomiche point out in the introduction to Figures du parasite, ambivalence is fundamental to the nature of hospitality - and, precisely because the parasitical relationship embodies the most ambivalent relationship between guest and host, 'Ie parasite est l'element indispensable pour interroger les ambivalences de l'hospitalit6' (Roman and Tomiche, 33). This essay will focus on the relationship between guest and host in three films which portray French society through the issue of hospitality. While these three films are from different eras (Renoir's La Regie dujeu, made in the troubled months just before the Second World War; Claude Chabrol's New Wave classic from 1959, Les Cousins; and Karim Dridi' s 1995 postcolonial film Bye Bye) they are all grounded in periods of crisis and/or transition in French history where the distinction between guest and host blurs or breaks down, making it difficult to assess whether a perceived threat to French society comes from within or without. La Regie dujeu is set on the eve of the Second World War in 1939 and reflects not only Renoir's disgust with the outcome ofthe Munich agreements that carved up Czechoslovakia, but also with the state of mind of French society as his country drifted inexorably toward war. Chabrol' s film, which came out twenty years later, is one ofthe founding films of the New Wave, coinciding with de Gaulle's return to power in the wake of growing unrest in Algeria, the creation of the Fifth Republic, and the first phase ofthe dissolution of France , s colonial empire. Karim Dridi' s Bye Bye grows out of another period of cultural transition, during which French society has had to confront the difficulty of assimilating African immigrant populations with different cultural norms, as well as second-generation immigrants who have grown up between two cultures. While Bye Bye is only one example of what might arguably be called a transitional, rather than a peripheral genre, 'Beur cinema', Dridi's film explicitly focuses on hospitality, and notably two crucial moments in the rites of hospitality: the guests' arrival and their departure. The first part of the essay will concentrate on the parasitical relationship which, as Michel Serres has argued in Le Parasite, plays a crucial role in the diverse systems and institutions that make up human society. The second part of the essay will treat the relationship between guests and hosts in Renoir and Chabrol's films, considering them