As his latest film is released in theaters, First Cow, the Center Pompidou, in Paris, devotes, until October 24, a retrospective to its director, Kelly Reichardt. The opportunity is therefore offered to revisit this work, which, although parsimonious (seven feature films in twenty-six years of career, almost as many short and medium), patiently built, with its back turned to Hollywood, with a remarkable modesty of means, counts among the most important of contemporary American cinema, for its intrinsic beauty, its refusal of the spectacular and its breathtaking acuity of gaze.
Born in 1964 in Miami, Florida, but attached to the landscapes of verdant Oregon, Reichardt depicts America emptied of its founding myths, but in the unknown folds of which still resides, as long as we want to look into it, the source of a possible renewal.
A source also occupies the heart ofOld joy (2006), the director’s first film – released on October 13 in a restored version – to fix this frugal approach that we know her, twelve years later. River of grass (1994), an anti-Bonnie and Clyde promising, but still fused with the “indie” aesthetic of its time. Two old friends go hiking for a weekend to reach a hot spring nestled in the middle of the forest. Along the way, they have time to get lost and Reichardt, like a good landscaper, to probe this buffer zone between city and nature where one is gradually giving way to the other. The bath as a reward is a moment of osmosis between the two men, a return to the sensations in which the priesthood of urbanized existence hangs for each one. The beauty of the work is immediately obvious: that of an elementary story, which allows time to pay attention to people, to the environment and to this tension between oneself and the distant that we call “territory” . Open frames, a sense of space and wide breaths of the montage are the main formal features.
What then is this “old joy” of Reichardt’s cinema, if not that of reuniting with the innocence of the world, from which modernity is striving to distance us? That, for example, experienced in Wendy and Lucy (2008) the lost young woman played by Michelle Williams, when she finds safe and sound the dog she had lost, after having broken down on the way to Alaska. This breakdown is for the director the opportunity to draw a portrait of the marginal America of small towns (vagabonds, security guards, garage owners) and to weave around her heroine a network, however fragile, of small solidarity.
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