three ages in the life of a shepherd in rural Bulgaria

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED

February is Kamen Kalev’s most beautiful film to date, a giant leap in a filmography that each time seemed to start from scratch, explore new avenues, zigzag, from the disenchanted realism ofEastern Plays, who revealed it in 2009 at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, until thwarted thriller Head down (2014), with Melvil Poupaud. Having sometimes given in to the sirens of reflexivity, and having scattered himself in unnecessary complications, the young Bulgarian filmmaker trained at the Femis takes here a step of simplicity which turns out to be infinitely beneficial. By opting for a certain frontality, a very reduced recourse to dialogue, a natural setting, Kalev reveals what had until then been buried under the layers of his cinema: a taste for the fable, its clear line and its strength of synthesis, dedicated to drawing a broader meaning from all human experience, which has lesson value.

Read also: “Eastern Plays”: Europe without illusions by Bulgarian Kamen Kalev

February paints the portrait of a simple man, Petar, a shepherd from the distant rural South-East of Bulgaria, not far from the Turkish border, in three parts which correspond to the three ages of his life. The first is that of childhood, when, as a little boy, Petar came to help his dark grandfather watch over his herd of goats and take him to graze in the heights of a remote countryside. At the age of man, we find him the day after his wedding night, leaving for military service, then assigned to the island of Saint-Yvan, off the Black Sea, where, distant and little talkative, he Above all, during his conscription, he takes a passion for the birds that inhabit this small plot of land. Finally comes old age, when, back home, Petar, a parchment face and graying fleece, continues to raise his goats in the dead of winter, reluctant to descend into the valley to visit his family. The earth is as bare as the fallen trees: it is the month of February, the end of one cycle and undoubtedly the beginning of another.

Non-verbal grammar

The film thus portrays, in the form of a triptych, a loneliness perpetuated through the ages, containing in itself a secret: the recognition of oneself as part of an environment, tacit consent to the natural order. , the acceptance of a rural condition made up of cycles, comparable to an eternal return of things. For this, Kamen Kalev resorts to a non-verbal grammar: that of the human silhouette related to the landscape, its reliefs and its expanses, and of the body facing the elements. So February Does it take as well from the plastic study on elementary man as from the book of hours declining according to the moments of the day, the states of light. At each age, the staging gives a different form: to childhood that of a tale with magical and golden reflections, where the forests unfold their forbidden paths; at puberty that of the military ritual, which imposes rigidity and symmetry on the body; in the third age the diffuse mists of winter, where the contours of the world become blurred and gradually plunge into darkness.

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