2023-09-06 13:33:33
Throughout her life, the iconoclastic film critic Minou Petrowski projected the image of a strong and liberated woman, who assumed as much her rants on the air as her penchant for young men in her private life. However, this freedom that some admired also had a price for those close to him, who often experienced it rather as a form of egocentrism. Starting with his own daughter, Nathalie Petrowski.
The journalist wrote hundreds of portraits of personalities from the time she was a columnist in the pages of La Presse. This time, she signs that of her own mother, who died two years ago. The portrait she paints of Minou Petrowski in 130 pages is often vitriolic, sometimes touching, but never complacent.
“Mother-daughter relationships are very often portrayed in the media as idyllic. The women who speak of their mother publicly, it is always to pay homage to them, to say to what extent they are in symbiosis. But in fact, mother-daughter relationships are always complex. Sometimes, like with my mother, it’s downright difficult. That’s what I wanted to express. It started from a very personal impetus, but so much the better if others can recognize themselves, ”explains Nathalie Petrowski from the outset, on the sidelines of the publication of The life of my mother.
Minou Petrowski, or Georgette Visda by her baptismal name, was born in Nice in 1931 to parents from the Soviet Union, most likely Jews, who gave her up for adoption. During the Occupation in France, she lived with the fear of being persecuted. Then, she knew all the period of cultural expansion and sexual liberation of the post-war period, before immigrating to Canada with her husband, the director André Petrowski.
Joining Radio-Canada as a make-up artist, she was a reporter in the 1960s on the program Femmes d’Aujourd’hui, before becoming a film critic and host of cultural programs therefollowing. “She only lived for the stars she rubbed shoulders with. There was a whole yard around her. A lot of people adored her and I understand them, because it’s true that she might be trippy. But when you are his daughter or his son, it’s another story, ”says Nathalie Petrowski in an interview with Le Devoir.
Collateral damages
Without being moralistic or reactionary, My Mother’s Life shows the other side of the coin of this bohemian life, of this existentialism which shattered old family values in the 1960s and 1970s in Quebec. This book is at the same time a counterweight to a whole current discourse, which sets up as a feminist model unworthy mothers, cougars and other non-conformists, like Minou Petrowski.
“My mother didn’t call herself a feminist, but she was one by her way of life. Women like her were pioneers. We owe them a lot, I owe them a lot. But we must also understand that this break with the established order was brutal. It’s been hard on the people around, and [mon frère et moi] we were the collateral damage of that “, tempers the journalist, who can still be regularly heard on the airwaves of the First channel.
My mother didn’t call herself a feminist, but she was by her way of life. Women like her were pioneers. We owe them a lot, I owe them a lot.
Nathalie Petrowski has always known that her mother was not really one. Minou was too immature to take on such a role; also too disinterested in her children. Nathalie and her brother Boris always felt like they were on their own. A feeling reinforced following the divorce of their parents.
For the eldest, Minou was at best a friend of pleasant company, with her erudition and her pronounced taste for parties. But her mother’s excesses sometimes made her just as uncomfortable. Like when Minou fell madly in love with Louis, her son Boris’ friend, on a New Year’s Eve. He was 21, she was 54. An even greater age difference than that with her previous boyfriend, Yves , 25 years his junior. Minou Petrowski’s taste for young men was common knowledge, which infuriated her daughter.
“A lot of women say cougars are so amazing, so liberating. But I who am the daughter of a cougar, I’m not sure it’s that extraordinary. I saw my mother suffer. They were still in their prime, and she wasn’t anymore, but she was trying to hold them back. I don’t judge all women who are in love with younger men. Of course, a relationship with an older woman can be healthy. The problem is when it becomes a pattern. And in the case of my mother, it was one, ”she slices.
Missing mother, but not missing daughter
Minou gave more importance to her young lovers than to her children. Nathalie Petrowski has always held it once morest her, without however keeping any trauma, she assures.
Time might have fixed things, but it didn’t. On the contrary, their relationship soured when Minou’s health began to fail. Minou, who suffered from dementia, might be execrable with Nathalie Petrowski, even if the latter moved heaven and earth to offer him a decent quality of life.
“She always criticized me for being too straight. Yes, I was. Yes, she was much freer than me. But at the end of her life, I don’t know what she would have done if I hadn’t been straight,” says the author, with a touch of bitterness.
Already before the illness, Minou Petrowski led a life that had nothing to do with the glitz of Cannes evenings to which she was accustomed when she was a film critic. Penniless following burning through all her savings, she was living off her daughter, who even paid for her a condo. Nathalie Petrowski never really felt any recognition from him. Enough to feed her a certain resentment, which persisted even following Minou had breathed her last.
“Writing this book was a way to appease all this anger,” says Nathalie Petrowski, who says she “almost” cried at her mother’s funeral.
The former star columnist of La Presse believes that she was a mother radically different from hers with her son, now in his thirties. Nathalie Petrowski will however have inherited her passion for cinema and her outspokenness. Somehow, she too admired this woman who left no one indifferent.
“You can’t write a book regarding someone you don’t like,” admits Nathalie Petrowski.
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