MARSEILLE

Sophie, a photographer from Berlin, is visiting Marseille; she’s walking down the streets. She looks at things, we can’t see which ones. Schanelec, instead, chooses to film cars driving by, security agents ensuring respect for an incomprehensible ban against taking pictures, children fighting down the street, a bus driver reading the newspaper while he’s waiting to get started again. Sophie is flirting with a mechanic she met by chance, then travels back to Berlin where she finds her real life again, one she’d rather give up but is unable to, with her best friend Hanna and her husband Ivan she’s silently in love with.
Marseille is also saturated with light and wide open to the wind while Berlin is closed in on itself, invaded by night. In these cities, characters never stop exchanging things: an apartment in Berlin for another one in Marseille, the Seventies’ song Mein Freund der Baum (My Tree’s Friend) for Trenet’s La Mer (The Sea), a car for an evening in a bar. But they prefer barely touching each other instead of meeting, avoid each other instead of saying they love each other. As if they could constantly let themselves haphazardly go, avoid choosing until an outside event forces them to. (M. H.)