THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Achieve the whole through the detail, the universal through the strictly local. This seems to be the ambitious project of Pascal Tagnati’s first feature film, which was presented in the ACID selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. Because if I comet could superficially, by its subject, relate to a tradition of French cinema, that which consists in capturing, in the carefree days of summer and vacation, a raw form of reality as well as a particular aspect of the human existence, it stands out completely from it by formal biases that avoid any naturalist temptation. One could thus quote, as possible references of the film, the cinema of a Jacques Rozier or an Abdelatif Kechiche, to name two immense painters of summer indolence, but one would be mistaken.
Pascal Tagnati’s film is in fact composed of a sedimentation of static shots condensing various moments, capturing several characters, of all ages, from the child on vacation to the invalid grandmother. They are, one guesses, some of the inhabitants of a small Corsican village in the middle of August. The immobility of the camera, because it is dedicated to capturing the variations of human activity slowed down by the summer, reveals the ambiguity of an uncertain image, an image in which the sensation of a meticulous composition of shots is constantly contradicted by that of a spontaneity of the captured moments. The choice of non-professional actors also breaks all the psychological conventions that a “natural” acting would determine. Dizzy.
Futile or serious discussions, evocations of varied existence, personal conflicts. Under a blazing sun, under the lanterns of a Saturday evening ball, on the way to a heavenly creek, on the village square, by the side of a swimming pool, we talk about football, loyalty in love, sex, politics, childhood and professional projects, leaving for Paris or elsewhere. The staging choices thus treat all words equally.
Literary genealogy
The film is a puzzle whose pieces, which at first seem (falsely) deployed in bulk, stick to each other to ultimately come close to a totality that will be unfindable anyway. Because it is the very structure of the film that will give deep meaning to the insignificance of words and moments. It will also confirm that, however fiercely isolated the location of the film may be, it is only part of a global, albeit off-camera, world. The village is no longer a village and Corsica is no longer an island. In this respect, note that the only erotic scene, intimate moment par excellence, is a virtual sexual intercourse, from one computer screen to another. All connected.
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