THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Childhood Without Love has given French cinema some of its most beautiful films: The four hundred Blows (1959), by Francois Truffaut, Naked Childhood (1968) And The House of the Woods (1971), by Maurice Pialat, Of sound and fury (1988), by Jean-Claude Brisseau, or even, closer to us, the films of Laurent Achard. It would be necessary, above all, to stick to this cinematographic ethics: to observe the world since the glance of a small boy left to himself, that all is new, rough and cutting like the first times of an orphan. It is under the aegis of these filmmakers that Astrakhan (from the name of this black wool that is taken from lambs killed in their mother’s womb) first very successful feature film by David Depesseville who also quotes the placidly painful films of Gérard Blain.
Samuel, a turbulent 12-year-old orphan, has been placed for a few weeks with Marie, who lives in the Morvan with her husband and two children. The nanny (Jenny Beth, fair, concrete and minimal) oscillates between maternal tenderness and exasperation, and never takes the trouble to hide the reasons for her hospitality from Samuel: the sum he brings her is essential to support her family. Because he is unloved, the boy is immersed in a bath of arbitrary events: impossible to predict whether the next experience will be a delight (the snow class, the first cinema) or a burn (the punishments of the adult world) .
Random Violence
Each sensation operates like a stab on this psyche in a state of permanent alert, delivered to random violence, to everything that falls on childhood without refuge. This arbitrariness, Depesseville gives a superb account of it, remaining anchored to the gaze of its hero, wandering in this small primordial theater like a tale which could be the story of Red Riding Hood trying to escape the wolf (the uncle, whose by touches that he is a pedophile).
The director seizes with both hands a necklace of affects, sensations, an ageless misfortune of which he knowingly blurs the temporal markers. Astrakhan, it could be today or the 1970s, because childhood is less a stage in life than a kind of cinematic country that one can still wander through, left untouched by the emollient powers of naturalism. If the film clings in extremis to a lyricism that contravenes its beautiful placidity of principle, Depesseville manages to deposit in our memories its beautiful desperate images.
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