THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Damien Odoul, 53, is one of the great heterodox of French cinema. Unknown, his work, inaugurated in 1992 by a film which will take twelve years to be released in cinemas (Morasseix, 1992), is a kind of libertarian and carnivalesque ode to free association, to phalansteries of all kinds, to nudity, to both sexual and poetic unbridling. Excess, drive, ordeal rub shoulders with a tenderness that does not say its name.
Theo and the metamorphoses, his ninth feature film, goes to the forest to fit into the life of Théo, a twenty-year-old with Down syndrome who lives there in a beautiful, uncluttered house, self-sufficient with his father, a fundamentally original man and photographer who s absent from time to time to pursue an international career. We would put our hand to cut that it’s pure documentary, but the film is written, and Theo and his father are actors.
Edenic Fable
The film is thus constructed in two stages, narrated in a stream of consciousness by Theo’s inner voice, punctuated throughout in brief chapters, made even more percussive by the Indian raga music that introduces them. The first part shows the cohabitation of the young man with his father, a gentle monster devoted to the well-being of his son, a supporter of playful, virile and unusual methods.
Under the sign of a life close to nature, father and son pretend to adopt strict physical discipline, stroll naked in the woods, often challenge each other. Théo, under the empire of Asia, dreams of becoming a ju-jitsu champion. He also talks to birds. Animals, diurnal and nocturnal, often cross the field of this Edenic fable.
Another scene opens when the father leaves for professional reasons. Left to his own devices, Theo allows cruel visions to flow within him, opens up to a phantasmagoria worthy of Songs of Maldoror. Crushing his father’s testicles, sleeping with a fearsome blue-haired ninja, coming across the reincarnation of Bob Marley as a bulldog, spawning with a snake woman before transforming himself into a woman: these are all paintings that show the farewell to civilized society, the desire to breathe with the immemorial breath of nature, the furious desire to cast off and experience the freedom of being other than oneself.
Very beautiful metamorphoses which are proposed to us, by virtue of a kind of filmic art brut where the different actor, refined, telluric, engages all the power of his bodily truth and his vital force in the implementation of a shared imagination.
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