THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
It’s been half a century that André Téchiné, a filmmaker who has turned 80, has been playing the same cards to relaunch himself each time. In his game, between death and resurrection, full-on romance, youthful fury, a love of the baroque and of difference (notably homosexual), the temptation of the forbidden, of sordid tragedy, of family neurosis , nostalgia for the country (South-West), a constant take on the socio-political air of the time. According to the films, things come together with great happiness, sometimes less easily. This is the case of these Soulmates.
David (Benjamin Voisin), engaged in the French forces present in Mali, is the victim of an attack while he is escorted in an army vehicle. Repatriated to France in extremely serious condition, he slowly came out of a coma, but lost his memory. His sister Jeanne (Noémie Merlant), who never stopped watching over him at the army hospital in Paris and believing in his resurrection, accompanies him on his return to his native country, in the Pyrenees. There is in this almost symbiotic story of brother and sister a great beauty and, at the same time, as always with Téchiné, a great tear.
Detuned energies
Reviving thanks to her, who is constantly by his side, David draws closer, spiritually and carnally, to this beautiful girl whom he seems to care not that she is his sister at the moment when she decides, irrevocably, to move away from him. It’s a heavy secret, which he no longer remembers and which he therefore blindly wants to relive, unites them. The opposite reason, the vivid memory of their incestuous affair, pushes Jeanne to refuse this return of the same and to want to leave it at all costs. It is therefore to a double liberation that the sister invites the brother, from between the arms of death and family entropy, by inviting him to live again as one would write on a blank page.
Something however, between these two powerful romantic motives which are amnesia and incest, which would be enough on their own to arouse fictional vertigo, seems to weaken each other reciprocally. The interaction of the couple itself, between this desiring abyss that is the boy and this liberating impetus that moves the girl, is affected by the dissociation of their state. These are two bodies that are not at the rendezvous, two out of tune energies, whose distance the spectator, unaware of the fires that united them, can only note with a certain indifference. And it is from a similar organic disintegration that the secondary characters of this story suffer, André Marcon portraying a desperate old misanthrope who disguises himself as a woman and Audrey Dana a village mayor, friend of the family. Story of an unbinding, Soul mates will no doubt have accomplished its purpose too perfectly.
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