Hurry

Damien is a young man in a hurry. He can’t wait to get working on a movie, and show it in its everyday reality to bring charm, give that feeling of being stunned, and convert life into an oceanic adventure. « Rise, Storm, rise! »: that’s his magic formula screamed out in front of the ocean, hoping the doors of marvel might open up faster. A young woman appears out of nowhere as if she had deliberately fallen into this village located at the tip of the Finistère, and asked to go along with Damien’s daydream. Camille de Chenay is also in a hurry: seven short films in six years, on top of her first feature-length film, also presented at FID this year for the French Competition (Un musée dort/A Museum Sleeps). We all know the pitfall whereby the ordinary of a fiction short film breaks up: the falling script. Camille de Chenay obviously takes such pleasure in telling stories and in producing narratives; but what she enjoys even more is making shots, assigning sound and image games the flow of a story that remains unsettled. Here, instead, everything moves fast, taking all the short-cuts, granting herself all possible swerving, unrelentingly rising up to the last illumination. For Camille de Chenay, making a film is turning the real world into an amusement park – as montage understood according to Eisenstein’s practice and conception and whose force the young film-maker employs to blow up the routines of French-style naturalism. As for Damien, he’s making his own film with a screen and a projector, with shattered glass, string bits, and light coming from a lighthouse. He certainly doesn’t know that his desire to work a lighthouse, turning it into a film machine, is the legacy which Grémillon and Epstein left him. This very mix of novelistic breath and avant-garde spirit makes Hurry! – and Camille de Chenay’s newly-born work – burst with vitality. (C.N.)