THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
The face is instantly familiar to us. An old man that one would like to have for a grandfather. Touching and amusing, depending on the detail to which you pay attention: the wrinkles dug like furrows, the mischievous eye, the scanty and shaggy hair or the mustache yellowed by nicotine. And then this pace which we guess was powerful, become more fragile, tottering. Hands shaking, big belly overflowing from the T-shirt. Jim Harrison, giant of contemporary American literature, appears to us damaged, and nevertheless joyful.
Poet philosopher a little tramp, mocking old epicurean worn out by the excesses and accidents of life, whose hoarse breath of voice died out in March 2015. Six months after the first part of the filming of Only the earth is eternaland two weeks before its resumption.
However, it is a perfectly accomplished, intense and peaceful film that journalist and producer François Busnel (who presents the literary magazine “La Grande Librairie” on France 5) and director Adrien Soland reported from their stay with the writer. Three weeks of discussions, meals, fishing trips on the Yellowstone River, journeys through the majestic landscapes of America during which, day and night, Jim Harrison never stopped talking.
Comfortable and confident, at home, in his house in Montana, in the company of a journalist and a director whom he had already met – notably in 2011, for an issue of “Carnets de route” (France 5). The writer did not balk. He let the camera follow him as he was, at sunrise and sunset, motionless for a long time facing the wide open spaces, patient on his boat waiting for it to bite, laughing when it comes to trapping snakes. Sometimes silent before the beauty of the world.
Inseparable
Because the author of Wolf. fictional memoirs, of Fall Legendsof Northern Michiganof Dalva keeps his wonder at nature intact. He never tired of rivers, fields, mountain ranges, deserted expanses – these isolated places where he chose to live. And this wild America that each of his novels describes, Jim Harrison tells it like no one else. “The landscape can take away all sorrows”, he says at the beginning of the film. And God knows if he had sorrows, knew dramas. The loss of his left eye, when he was just a kid, because of a nasty blow from a stick by a little girl. The disappearance, when he was only 20 years old, of his father and his sister in a car accident. The fall of a cliff which blocked his back. Depression and excess.
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