The broadcast of a French TV production about a fictional love affair that starts during the 2015 Bataclan terror attack in Paris, where 90 people were killed and many more injured, has been postponed after the wife of one of the victims started a petition, saying that it was hurtful and too soon after the attack.
Now the channel (France 2) has held the project, Ce soir-là (That Night), while survivor’s groups are consulted, as perhaps they should have been in the first place. The views of grieving relatives should always be respected.
Then again, the makers of Ce soir-là don’t seem to have intended any offence. The drama isn’t about terrorists, it’s about two people who meet when they try to help people involved in the attack. Or is that inadvertently offensive – the incident where your loved one died being used as the backdrop for someone else’s “meet-cute”?
It could be that two years is just too short a time. However, when would grief stop feeling so raw for those directly affected by such a tragedy? Maybe never, in some cases.
There is also an argument for fictionalised accounts helping to keep the memories of those who died alive; repositioning them, and what happened to them, in the conversation of the present.
It’s unclear whether the relatives of the deceased would also have objected to a designated drama about the Bataclan. However, how programmes or films are approached is always going to be crucial.
There are countless examples of dramas being drawn from real-life tragedies that, far from being crass and ill-judged, become quite the opposite, as long as it is always remembered that timing is not the only area of sensitivity.
