Celebrating workers’ memories isn’t simple. The motif so often serves an unconscious
cynicism, mechanically multiplying complacency, by kneading Marxism and
Christianity into an indigestible homogenous dough. The gamble therefore becomes
a challenge that Jérôme Gravayat boldly takes on in this first film. Rather than an
odious pathos, to the unequivocalness of a repeated and much exploited martyr,
he prefers the risk and blurring of impurity, largely deployed. The impurity of black
and white mixed with colour, for example, that indicates the fogging of expected
chronologies and presences so obvious that another method is required to make
them buzz, in other words to make them exist right down to their hesitation. The
impurity of a filiation which dares lean on old immigrant workers in the figure of
young wandering men turned into vagabonds. The impurity of the confrontation
between archives and images today. The impurity of sonic echoes that, above all,
seem to be the real guides in a film which craftily plays with its structure in the form
of a refrain linking yesterday with today.
The standing men of the title reeled at first. To the beat of their alienation, of their
relegation, of yesterday, of today, to the beat of songs recorded on cassettes and
old records. Their speech or their silence take on a posture (to some extent) in these
refrains, but it allows the image to find complicities, and the film to advance without
a safety rail. (JPR)