ACID
With each new “summer film” announced, a thought comes to us: has French cinema not already said everything, shown everything, of this beloved season for filmmakers? We think of the unbeatable Jacques Rozier and Eric Rohmer, closer to us, of Guillaume Brac or the splendid Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (2018), by Abdellatif Kechiche – to name a few. It is up to each film to disabuse us of this ingrained prejudice, and to show us once again that we were wrong. Because as long as there are filmmakers at its height, summer will be an inexhaustible muse. Thus the first feature film by actor and director Pascal Tagnati, I Comete, presented to the ACID (Association of independent cinema for its diffusion) in Cannes.
These are the summer holidays in Corsica, we are in a village whose name is never mentioned, those who come back for the summer mingle with those who have never left the village. Families and friends meet, generations come together. The two hours of the film function as a series of sketches of random duration and systematically filmed in a fixed shot (there will be only one exception to the rule), in which we are immersed in the process of unfolding: the scene has started without us, will continue in this way, the summer thus has neither beginning nor end, and Tagnati to seize the substantial marrow of these estival stasis. A party in the village, a young woman who caresses herself in front of her virtual lover (scene of unbridled eroticism), friends who bicker about football, two girlfriends who bathe and discuss loyalty, an old lady who has her hair done , singing children, family conflicts, political and love dialogues …
Film a collective body
If the device could appear rigid (still of the fixed shot), it is rediscussed by the infinite variety of captured moments, the arrangement of which does not seem to obey any strict rule. Each sequence is like the piece of a puzzle which remains to be done and which would secretly compose the outlines of an affect: the feeling of summer. And the construction of this feeling takes precedence over the distinction of protagonists. Because if individualities slowly emerge, Pascal Tagnati decides to film a collective body, and a story where the power of the moment prevails over the linearity of the whole – we think here of the first films of Pascal Thomas, great filmmaker of the summer, and in particular at Hot bunny (1974). We thus deduce the few narrative issues, and what the characters are for each other in their discussions: far from losing us, this disorientation increases our attention tenfold for a present that is constantly being started over.
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