THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Writer, screenwriter for television and for the cinema – If I was a man (2017), by Audrey Dana, Fathers profession, by Jean-Pierre Améris (2021) –, Murielle Magellan signs her first feature film, The Blank Page, adapted from the eponymous comic strip by Boulet and Pénélope Bagieu (Delcourt/Images). Murielle Magellan was also the director of The Invisible Lesbian (2011), when Océanerosemarie – now known as Océan, the first French artist to publicly claim his trans identity – came out.
The story of The Blank Page holds in one line: a young woman loses her memory and, going through this dizzying experience, wanders as if on a thread, the fall never being far away. The director called on Sara Giraudeau to play the thirty-something Eloïse, and the “sad clown” side of the actress creates an unexpected atmosphere from the first shots. Filming Paris like a village, in a steep district of the 18e borough, The Blank Page neighbor between silent cinema and storytelling, slow rhythm, cottony, but also joyful, the heroine arousing in her torpor a whirlwind of misunderstandings and unexpected situations. Do not rely on the trailer, which, contenting itself with putting on a multitude of scenes, “shrinks” and trivializes the universe of the film.
Eloise is sitting on a bench under the trees. She seems to wake up, not sure what she’s doing there. She can’t find her phone anymore and thinks it was stolen. She decides to enter the small photocopy shop, just in front of her, and asks the seller (Pierre Deladonchamps, lunar boy named Moby Dick) if he hasn’t seen something. This one has just arrived and can’t tell her anything, but he explains that his colleague will certainly be able to inform him, later… Eloise then goes to her building, but, first bug, she no longer remembers the code … A neighbor ends up coming out, and tells him that his cat looks hungry. Phew, finally a clue that allows her to locate the door to her apartment – lucky she still has the key.
Little disturbances in life
Panicked, still reeling from the vertigo aroused by this sudden amnesia, the young woman searches her drawers, reads her notes, her papers, to try to find out who she is. She ends up understanding that she is a saleswoman at the bookseller Gibert, in the Saint-Michel district. That’s it, but at what number on boulevard Saint-Michel, several bookstores coexist in the block of buildings, and in what department?… After these first minutes upside down – of the “in what state am I wandering” type –, the film installs its comic device: refusing to explain to those around her what is happening to her, except to her colleague Sonia (Sarah Suco), Eloïse prefers to deceive those around her. By taking the elevator at Gibert’s, she thus discovers that she has a lover at her place of work, with whom she obviously has a purely sexual relationship.
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