THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Living a passion, as we know, is never easy. But passion has this capacity to reduce the data of existence to very little; it suspends, for a short time only, the web of small problems which are closely woven into everyday life. She reshuffles the cards for accessories and necessities. It is perhaps this simplicity, that of a pure experience report, that Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel aimed at in 1992, to which director Danielle Arbid gives, twenty-eight years after its publication, a free interpretation. The idea that the physical relationship, unassimilable by the social body, silences all the rest, all the relational hubbub that we confuse with life.
Simple passion, the fifth feature film by the Lebanese-born filmmaker, and the first not to evoke head-on or sideways to her roots, therefore does not bother with justification, but aims straight away at the heart of this secret report, which is also an adventure of bodies in contact. A woman, Hélène (Laetitia Dosch), makes love with a man, Alexandre (the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin), and she enjoys it. She tells in voice-over what their adulterous relationship was for more than a year: from this stealthy Russian character married to the service of oligarchs, she only waited for the signs – a message, a phone call – to make himself available and sleep with him. The rest of the time, when Hélène teaches, writes books, raises her son, goes to see a movie with a friend (Hiroshima my love, another scandalous love story), is for her entirely tense towards the putative moment of reunion, as if everything was only the epiphenomenon.
The beauty of Danielle Arbid’s film is to stick to this vow of simplicity: to chronicle this singular love by snatching it from the old moons of romanticism, without falling into the clinical case study either. Line not so easy to hold, which requires first to show love as a void, because above all the absence of the other. Helene’s infatuation only reaches its peak during Alexander’s long eclipses, when all her thoughts are directed towards him. It is in this void that love borders on obsession, in that it is tempted to repaint the whole world in the colors of the absent – who like Hélène on a trip to Florence did not ogle the buttocks of stone of a statue thinking of her lover?
Enjoyment without tomorrow
The reunion is all the more intense, delivered to the pure present of a joy without a future. And even with him, it is still against him that Hélène loves Alexandre: at least against his marital status and his sociological profile, those of an upstart chauvinist. “Who loves Poutine and American turnips”. Passion has nothing to do with the social being, it is located on another level: interior, phantasmal.
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