CinémaTrailer16 November 2022
"Reste un peu": the scene with Gad Elmaleh
In "Reste un peu" (2022), the film in which Gad Elmaleh recounts his pull toward Catholicism, Delphine Horvilleur plays herself, credited as "La Rabbine." A consultation scene that became famous: to the comedian asking how one comes back after leaving, she answers with the Jewish house whose exit no one has ever found. Her monologue is reproduced here in full. In French.
“An after-sales service? You won't be able to come back, because you won't be able to leave. The Jewish house: I believe you can look for the exit, but no one has ever found it. Nobody knows what holds the Jewish house together. You see, Jews have lived for thousands of years in a slightly broken, slightly wobbly house. For two thousand years they have been telling themselves the Temple is destroyed. It has been so long since Moses broke the Tablets of the Law. Every time one of them gets married, he smashes a glass. Every time a baby comes into the world, well, a little something is taken from him. The Jewish house, really, is a slightly wobbly house.”
“But what I am telling you there, you know it very well. You know it because you know you are broken. When I see you, when I listen to you, when I watch your shows, your sketches, you are always slipping into the skin of someone else who seems truly at home. The skin of a Canadian, of an American, of a blond guy whose car trunk is perfectly tidy, whose kids are terribly polite. But the reason you can slip into those men's skins is that it isn't you. It's because you are a bit more broken than that, because your own trunk is not tidy, I suspect, and things are a bit more wobbly than that. And because it is wobbly, you can look at it from the outside, and you are never quite in it.”
“And maybe you are never more yourself than when you are on the way to somewhere else. The question is: are you supposed to arrive anywhere? Does your journey end at the foot of a church?”