THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Author of two beautiful documentaries noticed (cattle, Makala), it was only natural that Emmanuel Gras, one day in winter 2018, got involved in a demonstration of “yellow vests” and found there the subject of a long-term documentary, setting up his camera at the outskirts of Chartres, on a roundabout taken over by militants. The director took his time, preferring to the urgency of a film like I want sun ! by François Ruffin (released in theaters in April 2019) the patience of someone who tries to capture all the metamorphoses and moods of a social revolt that is here to stay.
Looking at it more closely and longer than the others, Emmanuel Gras could no longer grasp a homogeneous, perfectly consolidated movement, but follow the curve of a political cardiogram, which links collective fervor and discouragement. The filmmaker multiplies the approaches: interviews facing the camera, portraits, Parisian demonstrations, rallies on the roundabout, following until the last fires the protests and the masquerade of the great debate.
A fatigue that comes from far away
We are grateful to the documentary filmmaker, who never tries to make beautiful images behind the backs of his protagonists, for keeping the course of accuracy, always nuanced, where everything is discussed in this political laboratory: the question of the leader, the use of violence, endurance on roundabouts, the image of “cassos” [cas sociaux] that the militants think of sending back. This endurance was necessarily necessary to grasp the inevitable phenomenon of entropy of the movement, which is amplified by a release of the film in 2022. Since then, other events have passed through there: Covid, antipass demonstrations, presidential election, rightwing of the political landscape …And the film illuminates itself with a whole topicality that makes its subject matter more twilight, transforms it into a setting for an unfinished political dream.
Because if a people draws a common thread, it would be that of exhaustion – of the social body, of proletarian bodies. The one that, at the end of the film, can be read on the faces of its heroines in tears, traumatized by the brutality of the demonstrations, ravaged by a fatigue that comes from very far away. Moreover, on several occasions, Emmanuel Gras gently insists on a contrast. The roundabout of the “yellow vests” ironically adjoins a sports hall where a simple window separates two Frances: the one who is getting back in shape and the one who is exhausted. As if everything was, basically, only a story of the body.
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