two vampires on their way to Andalusia

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

In the middle of summer, two vampires set off on the roads of France, heading for Marinaleda, a small town in Andalusia known to be “the only communist village in the world” – we can read on the Internet that, there, “the police do not exist and the rents are 15 euros”. Friendly vacationers pick them up, chat in a “fun zone” of a motorway rest area, unaware that their friendliness condemns them to devouring.

What are vacations for? Sometimes making films, often with next to nothing: a car, a small team, non-professional actors, an old country house. On the road to Marinaleda, everything becomes a little more possible, like mixing genres that are not used to being familiar with each other: the holiday movie, the vampire movie and the road movie take turns driving. Each new encounter is the site of a break in tone, of an aberrant movement.

The beauty of friends

In Marinaleda, third medium-length film by Louis Séguin, the young French auteur cinema is reconnecting with what it knows how to do best and what it does not do enough: featherweight, amateurism in the noblest sense of the term, which consists in cherishing the asperities of a phrasing, of a body, the awkwardness of an actor, the beauty of his friends whom one makes play. There is a grace of badly tuned instruments which, here, vibrates with each shot, and first of all in its very beautiful duo of vampires (François Rivière and Luc Chessel, prizewinners at the Côté court festival, in Pantin), which slowly slips from lightness to a form of gravity, that of two ageless bodies, exhausted with desire. The screenplay, stripped of its linearity, is reduced to a dice that you throw and relaunch, guided by one principle: you only ever film your desire to film.

Thanks to a misunderstanding, the two vampires get into the car of Lise (Pauline Belle), a young woman who is hosting them for the night. So the film opens on one of those interminable nights where the conversation is there only to fan the flame of a desire, of an enjoyment constantly postponed… Until the apotheosis of an arrival in Marinaleda, already marked with the seal of memory. In summer, living in the present is impossible.