THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Paris, at night, in the shimmer of white car headlights, blue ambulance sirens, golden survival blankets muffle the silhouettes. Among them, a dazed couple wanders in the disorder, then reaches the silent streets. The next day, the man and the woman wake up in their apartment. She immediately got down to housework. Dragging him from bed to sofa, before a panic attack suddenly paralyzes him. She tries to calm him down.
A first flashback takes us back to the previous evening, when Céline (Noémie Merlant) and Ramon (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) both go to the Bataclan where friends are waiting for them. These inaugural sequences sum up Isaki Lacuesta’s film, both in content and form. Since it is now a question of following the daily life of this young couple, after the attacks of November 13, 2015. Which arise in many flashbacks – the music, the cheerfulness, the first shots, the panic, the precipitated bodies… – who struggle to show the unshowable and remind us of the violence of the trauma suffered.
Binary mode
The characters will do what they can, the couple will not survive it. Both present in the Paris concert hall at the time of the terrorist attack, each reacted in diametrically opposed ways. While Ramon rehashes the events over and over again and lets himself be overwhelmed to the point of having to quit his job, Céline on the contrary tries to forget and resume a normal life.
Adapted from the story Paz, Love and Death Metal (Tusquets editions, 2018, untranslated), by the Spaniard Ramon Gonzales (survivor of the Bataclan), One year, one night thus stages, in place of the author, a couple whose slow separation takes place almost without warning, as repetitive gestures and days progress. Filmed most of the film with a handheld camera, as close as possible to faces, skin, bodies, the characters each act according to the register assigned to them from the outset, without ever taking height.
Unlike some films on the same theme (Amandaby Mikhaël Hers, 2018; See Paris again, by Alice Winocour, 2022), this absence of point of view which abandons the film to its binary mode – confrontation of two attitudes, alternation between past and present – harms the power of the subject. And unfortunately only makes the weaknesses of the production more visible, closer here to reporting than to cinema.
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