LA RENAISSANCE

Nader Ayach is not afraid of putting his body to the tests of film. He proved this in La guerre des centimes, where he boldly rode his bike through Paris, camera in one hand, handlebars in the other. Here, it’s as a human camera with tripod legs and lens eyes that he embodies Fadhel Messaoudi’s double, an oud master between life and death after the accident that brutally begins this film. After this opening in media res, the director propels us into an afterlife à la Chris Marker, where we meet the musician’s double as though “awoken in a different time and reborn as an adult” (La Jetée). Saddled with a virtual reality headset, he’s sent back to Earth by a curious ferryman wearing large dark glasses, a secular figure played by the filmmaker Jilani Saadi. With great economy of means, La Renaissance borrows from Saadi’s films a touch of their insolent grace, and from video games elements of their grammar. He thus sets up a fictional approach full of ruses, fuelled by tinkering and making do, updating how portraits are written with subjective vision, evolving levels and an avatar. The avatar chosen by Fadhel for his double is Abu Huraira, a character from a novel by Mahmoud Messadi, which tells the story of a great departure into the unknown. The adventure, prosaic here and made up of rugged images of journeys on the metro and walking across a cold, dreary Paris, gives the opportunity to tenderly retrace Fadhel’s tragic path and his obstacles as an exile since arriving from Tunisia. Exile is also something experienced by the director, who, relieved of the finery of fiction, reveals in a reflection of his character what seems to be at the heart of this Renaissance: a tribute to an artist, a gesture of love, and the possibility of reinventing oneself through film.

Louise Martin Papasian