THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
They are friends and each work to unearth in their works the joys of immodesty. It is therefore obvious when Arthur Dreyfus (writer, author of Sex diary of a boy today, POL, 2,304 pages, 37 euros) takes the camera to film Noël Herpe, film historian, writer and diarist. And it is shamelessness that presides over Christmas and his mother, documentary with a device as tenuous as it is elegant. On a theater stage plunged in darkness, a spot illuminates Noël Herpe and his mother, Michelle Herpe-Voslinsky, translator, who narrate, as they would have done in a psychoanalyst’s office, their family story.
Sometimes it is one who speaks, then the other, at other times the two are summoned to the couch. Together, they decipher a family photo, focus on details: the son would have skipped two classes, but the mother assures us that it was only one; he deplores the lack of maternal affection, she considers that he was a child king.
From the particular to the mythological
By filming his friend, Arthur Dreyfus knows that he has a golden character in his hands: an out of date man with flamboyant narcissism, too refined for this world, a skillful storyteller and interpreter of an existence lived like a play with his scenes. matrix that one would believe came out of a Freudian text: the little “Herpounet” who speaks to a tree, tries to commit suicide at 3 years old by plunging into the swimming pool in the large basin, the first sexual emotions in front of a pair of tights belonging to to his mother… And then, that day when the son saw him sleeping with another man – an event which was for him at the origin of his sexuality. ” non-practicing “.
One might believe in a very private and navel-gazing story that only concerns the interested parties. But Arthur Dreyfus – helped by his ideally chosen characters – manages to go beyond the particular to reach the mythological: telling the mother, the son, what plays on the universal and archaic between them, the long list of misunderstandings and grievances. that separate them – or bind them forever. Family life appears as a series of missed appointments, like two films which will never succeed in being one.
And then, slowly, under the exuberance of the stories of oneself, the masks end up falling. Noël and Michelle appear for what they are: two sorrowful children who – luckily – will never stop explaining themselves.
French documentary by Arthur Dreyfus (1 h 30).