There he is, all smiles, Tonino De Bernardi, from the height of his 84 years, so to speak, because he is very small, with his sweater falling on his thighs. At his side, Isabelle Huppert also looks like a twig in her yellow mini sweater. Sunday January 23, at the Center Pompidou, in Paris, we went back in time, with the projection of Medea Miracle (2007), organized as part of the Hors Pistes festival, questioning the age of images, the question of the archive and that of aging bodies – video installations, screenings and meeting-debates until February 6.
Five films by this little-known filmmaker in France, made between 1969 and 2019 (i.e. a feature film taken from each decade), are shown until Saturday January 29: a space-time that allows you to appreciate the evolution of the work, strong of around forty films (newspapers filmed in 8-millimeters, on video, etc.), shot as close as possible to characters on the margins, often female (servant, prostitute, refugee, etc.). The long duration also reflects the acting and the changing bodies of the actors, some of whom return from one film to another – Tommaso Ragno, or even Giulietta Debernardi, the filmmaker’s daughter. Tonino De Bernardi, who lives in Turin, also plans to make a new film with Isabelle Huppert, the shooting of which was prevented by the outbreak of the pandemic.
Script Finds
Medea Miracle, which had a discreet theatrical release, revisits the myth of Médée in a contemporary and unexpected version: Isabelle Huppert plays the role of a refugee, Irène alias Médée, living on the outskirts of Paris, in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis). She, the French star, embodies the foreigner watched with suspicion, the other (Italian) actors representing the locals. An inversion of roles that the filmmaker treats with poetry and rigor, alternating color and black and white as a symbol of a lost paradise. Irene’s ex-husband, Jason (Tommaso Ragno), prepares to take another wife, and Irene is threatened with leaving the territory. His dissolute life would be incompatible with the laws of the land, he was told. What to do with children, abandon them, die with them?
The miracle of the story lies in the finds of the script, with its documentary bursts (in a women’s home), but also in the mixture of mastery and fragility of Huppert, so far removed from his usual roles. Looking like a queen in the deserted streets, she seems to have escaped from a New Wave film (by Godard or Rivette). She wants to live her life, but Paris does not belong to her, and even less France. Irène sings in a cabaret, and her version of Crazy Love, by Marianne Faithfull, is just bewitching, Huppert interpreting it in her hoarse, slightly dissonant voice, every evening in a different dress. A magician actress in a “crazy” movie.
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