YELLOW SATURDAY

Diplopia “is a functional vision disorder that results in the perception of two images for a single object” (Clément Chéroux). Antonin Peretjatko literally brings this double vision to the screen. He uses it to tackle one of the issues approached in Yellow Saturday – the perception of the so-called Yellow Vests protest movement, a lengthy political episode that has fuelled the media in their field-based battle to portray the demonstrators. Streets were already featured in the fiery La Fille du 14 juillet. Here, streets are the melting pot of a mocking and spirited political squib, that doubles as a tribute to Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l’air est rouge). Were it not for a few clues about our time (the yellow vests and the uniforms of the police force), Yellow Saturday could have been shot in the 1970s. Audaciously, the film intertwines the account of the demonstrations and their repression with a serpentine and playful storyline about the fleeting romances of the protagonist, Pierre Bolex (a witty name indeed). Nymphets in hot pants, James Bond Girls on Paris rooftops: the anachronistic male gaze is too conspicuous to be genuine. Behind the women who look like characters in films from the 1970’s, who are mute, reduced to their gender and excluded from the writing of insurrectional history, the film endeavours to question the argument from authority that determines the legitimacy of demonstrators and prevents those who are deemed unworthy of political commitment from speaking. Yellow Saturday weaves together two seemingly unrelated timelines: the Yellow Vests and the suspended time of successive lockdowns, to better incorporate them into a political continuity. Then, the schizophrenic and amnesiac, overacted and farcical carefreeness meets the practice of a filmmaker who has filmed these Saturday meetings himself with a 35mm camera, these meetings which are more dangerous and feverish than any lovers’ reunion, not really for aesthetic purposes, but rather to tell us fervently: “I was there”.
(Claire Lasolle)