THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
The project was, if we can say so, crazy. We don’t see who, apart from Nicolas Philibert, owner of a documentary praised by the French public in 2002, To be and to Have, and, moreover, a major figure in the genre, may have had the audacity to propose it to the film authorities (including its faithful partner Les Films du Losange), for a potential commercial career in theaters. Three successive films around madness, organized according to three locations of care at the Paris Center psychiatry center.
In April 2023, we discovered On the Adamant, the name of a barge on the Quai de la Rapée transformed into a day center, open to patients from the first four arrondissements of the capital. Poetic, semi-fantastic, devastating, madness, not yet freed from the suffering that authorizes it, asserted, in the shared freedom of so-called “institutional” psychiatry, its rights over the immaculate kingdom of reason.
In March 2024, Averroes & Rosa Parks on the other hand, took us into the harsh conditions of an old asylum structure, even if it had been freed from old practices, the Esquirol hospital in Saint-Maurice (Val-de-Marne). Patients in crisis, the very reason for their presence in this closed place, tension on their faces, palpable anxiety, delirium that surfaces, nourished a speech as best they could channeled and relieved by the caregivers. The Typewriter and other sources of hassle is finally discovered today, with its false air of a surrealist tale, a light and handy closing of the trilogy, filmed in town, at the homes of a few patients.
Owner and repairers
It is in truth about following the members of a very particular commando of caregivers, self-proclaimed “the orchestra”, who works, always in tandem and often with a screwdriver kit in hand, on small DIY and fitting out jobs in patients’ apartments. There we find figures now known to us, notably seen on the stationary boat. Patrice first, fifty or sixty-year-old, white hair, full interior. Eight thousand poems on the clock, two per day. It’s worth a pharmacopoeia. Written in handwriting, they are all typed in a second step, for posterity. When the machine works, that goes without saying.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. The ink ribbon no longer lifts. She therefore occupies, in her white plastic dress coiled around her metal smile, the center of the frame and the scene. Let’s dare to have a page of advertising for this object which no longer exists for a long time: it’s a Hermes-Precisa. Two shock technicians arrive, from a generation that does not agree with the object of a canonical age. The scene quickly becomes unbearable. The two men, screwdrivers in hand, circle around the thing, which would have fallen from the planet Mars and it would be the same. Failing to understand it, with its vicious screws, they dismantle it under the terribly worried eye of Patrice. Then, without mastering the subject further, they remantibulate it. The miracle occurs here: here she is walking again! In the meantime, the scene is in the box and it is an operation of the Holy Spirit which has just been filmed: faith moves mountains and Patrice, who is a hundred copies behind, leaves as if in forty.
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