THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD – NOT TO BE MISSED
An underground influence of the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin was to be found, in a more or less diffuse way, in the work of the American writer Philip Roth (1933-2018), for whom the French director has long confessed a deep admiration. From the recurring use of an alter ego by the name of Paul Dédalus, resonating with the rothien fictional double Nathan Zuckerman, to the dangerous links between autobiographical and romantic registers, more than one affinity was in fact apparent from one to the other. ‘other. At least it is this relationship that comes to formalize Deception, Desplechin’s latest feature film, which takes the acrobatic gamble of transposing Roth’s eponymous novel to the screen and into French, renowned for having taken the game of identifying masks and the vertigo of fiction very far.
The year is 1987 and the film opens with two postcard photos, showing Brooklyn Bridge in New York on the left, Tower Bridge in London on the right. A way of synthesizing the transatlantic movement which serves as a postulate for the story: the exile in London of a famous American writer named Philip (Denis Podalydès). For a whole year, he maintains an affair with a young Englishwoman (Léa Seydoux), wife and mother. Their interviews in a studio in Notting Hill, which serves as both an office and a bachelorette intellectual, punctuate the writing of a printed book, like fire chestnuts, of the conversations they both have, before or after having made love. He talks at leisure about the place of the Jews in the world; she tells of the disarray of her married life, her suffocation as a wife, through which a particular woman’s profile emerges: an inimitable syntax, a unique imprint, a certain arrangement of words and attitudes.
To express this collusion between the story and its writing, Desplechin relies here on the theater, which consists of a reduction to the caulked interiors where the amorous meeting takes place, but also in certain phantasmal puffs where the decor suddenly finds nudity. of a plateau, like so many breaches towards the mental scene of desire. Performative theater where all you have to do is say London or New York to find your way around right away, without having to prove anything.
Manned interviews
In this film constructed as a series of dialogues, the theatrical register abolishes the borders between interiority and exteriority (relation to the other), and offers a privileged setting for the word, captured in this pure state that the exclusivity of the head allows it. -headed. Desplechin and his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux film the talk in a sumptuous panoramic “Scope” format: invented for large spaces, this wide frame has the effect of unfolding the outlines of intimacy, and the ability to unite two faces in one. same close-up.
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