Gaël Lépingle is fond of what he calls “le temps désaccordé” or “out of tune time.”
He made use of it for the title of a portrait of the filmmaker Guy Gilles in 2008 and
earlier, the first matter of evocation of Nathalie Méningon, member of the Action
Direct, in his Prisonnière du Pont-aux-Dions (FID 2006). A propos de Julien, if its
synopsis is very thin, “teenagers playing knights, dreaming of a future, a search that
would lead them far from Beauce where they grew up,” it clearly indicates this main
discord. Between a certain young people and their dreams, between the French
countryside and an unknown elsewhere, between childhood and the adulthood that
threatens to soon erase it. It is in the place of this “between,” in its cracks and brief
intervals, that the film is going to take refuge in order to invent a style all his own,
both grim and sophisticated. On the one hand, documentary material abounds:
fields, roads, houses of a landscape transformed in a distant suburb, the stubborn
faces of adolescents, their ritual solemnly danced, their future projects mechanically
uttered. But, on the other hand, Lépingle refuses to believe that this fate is sufficiently
expressive, because he feels, beneath the poses and the silences, the rumblings
of something very different. If an epic appetite and a lyricism carry his “characters”
away elsewhere, it is evident that his gaze accompanies them with love. And it is
on the occasion of a medieval sound and light show that all the regimes of a
maintained time are going to confront each other, as in an out-of-tune state of grace.
(JPR)