ACID
We keep dazzled memories of Laure Portier’s first film, In the dog’s eye (2019), portrait of his grandmother who captured, in hollow, the birth of a cheeky, assertive filmmaker’s gaze. We do not know if the gesture will be a system, but Laure Portier has decided to dedicate her first two films to her own: after her grandmother, her brother, to whom she is dedicating her first feature film, Soy Free. The film combines a great economy of means with a very great and fully successful ambition, to show this part of fiction and mythology that each being contains, if you know how to look at it well.
When Arnaud appears to us, we have the impression of having already met him elsewhere: an uncompromising teenager, and whose delinquency is explained by a burnt childhood that he recounts in front of the camera. Because he lacked love, Arnaud cannot keep still: despite his many run-ins with the law, he cannot help but reoffend. He tags an RER, steals a scooter and prepares his exile in Spain.
Between Arnaud and Laure begins a face-to-face meeting where each discusses the position of the other. The brother wonders why the sister is filming a moment that seems particularly harmless to him, sneers at the idea of a scene that will appeal to “Culture cool babes” (in this case, us). As for the sister, she calls the brother to order when the latter gets carried away in speeches that are not like him: “Stop Arnaud, you’re talking to me, not to the camera, what do I care about Sarkozy…”
Moral pact
Far from being incidental, this perpetual questioning of their relationship gives the film all its accuracy, reminds us of what too many documentaries seek to make us forget: that this moral pact between a gaze and a subject must be constantly readjusted. Whoever lets himself be observed also challenges us with his gaze.
After having been this sociologically determined adolescent, Arnaud mutates, thanks to his exile. He fled to Alicante, abandoned the French he had suffered for the chosen Spanish, took over from his sister and filmed himself. He lives on petty theft, becomes homeless, we find him in Peru looting shops.
Very quickly, the landmarks are blurred: depending on the scene, the young boy has short or long hair. This is because, ignoring the chronology, the filmmaker films her brother as she sees him, an epic hero who travels the world, straight out of a Stevenson novel. In his wandering, Arnaud reinvents himself: it is no longer his environment that determines him, but this vital impetus that carries him to Peru, in search of an indeterminate thing, a form of appeasement that would await him in a place in the world – he is certain of it.
In a vertiginous scene, the film of the grandmother meets that of the brother: both face each other, we almost forget that the filmmaker is there. In this family reunion, their loneliness pierces the screen – as if the members of the same family were doomed to miss each other. This constantly missed meeting, the documentary can try to repair it; if Soy Free is the gift of a sister to a brother, it would undoubtedly be formulated as follows: you are alone, but I am looking at you.
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