a brother under the gaze of his sister

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED

Documentary portraits, there are many, but few have the passion, the strong heart and the bubbling blood of the first feature film by Laure Portier, born in 1983, entirely devoted to her brother Arnaud, eight years her junior. The art of the portrait is both the most common and the most mysterious, because it takes on the contours of an individual and is therefore entirely in its exclusive relationship to the human “subject” whose appearances it probes. But what happens when this subject, driven by an inner turmoil, does not stay in place, keeps looking elsewhere, tears itself away from all established frameworks? Be Free respond in the most beautiful way. This film, in turn, never stops running after it, the better to retain something of it: an image, even incomplete, a pulse, even syncopated.

Arnaud is not just any little brother, but an unfortunate double, the one who did not manage so well from a childhood in a city, in the Deux-Sèvres, caught in a pincer movement between disoriented parents and various stays in homes or educational centres. Produced between 2005 and 2021, the film brings together sixteen years of his life, from his turbulent adolescence marked by acts of delinquency to the beginnings of an adult appeasement that he went to seek very far across the Atlantic, in foreign lands. .

Quest for a second chance

We still discover him as a kid at the bottom of the blocks, teasing the scooter, forging himself with push-ups a look of a boss that belies the deep lucidity of his speeches in front of the camera. Then emptying his apartment, determined to stop the ” bullshit to start a new life in Spain. Then begin peregrinations where we find Arnaud intermittently, here or there, on foot or by plane, and soon as far as Peru, with an insatiable thirst for freedom, which is also understood as the desperate quest for a second chance. With it comes the feeling of being out of place and the shadow of a violence that constantly threatens to resurface.

Between the sister behind and the brother in front of the camera, the positions are much more uncertain, fluctuating than they seem. In a scene that shows him struggling with a defective two-wheeler, Arnaud criticizes the director for filming him in such a pitiful situation. Earlier, she didn’t hesitate to call out to him when she saw him lock himself into the cliché of the city kid. At a certain stage, it is Arnaud who, from time to time, sends his sister images of him, documenting his daily life as a vagrant or, in a mind-blowing passage, his participation in riots somewhere in South America. Having come to meet him in Lima, but faced with his absence, the filmmaker in turn passes in front of the camera and becomes a character. In this waltz of positions that binds and opposes them, a shared staging is gradually invented, where everyone prepares their own weapons. Those of Arnaud? An art of disappearance and emergence, a way of being furtive, of entering and leaving the image, which makes it elusive – and all the more fascinating.

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