Initiated with Flics then Commissariat (FID 2009), Virgil Vernier continues here his
enterprise for exploring our passions. Obvious with his persistence as observer and
moralist, the following epigraph borrowed from La Bruyère: “The city is shared in
different societies, which are like so many little republics, with their laws, their uses,
their jargon, and their words for laughing.” In the program of this sentence follows
a still picture: outside nighttime, entrance of a Parisian nightclub. A “physionomiste”
is at work. He sorts, withdraws behind the silence of a verdict, argues sometimes,
distributes, always generous, verdicts. God is not dead; he is God. Here we have
cut up a little, very little, theatre of passions. The stake, pathetic, decisive: in or out.
From where? From one evening Paradise.
On this threshold, the camera also persists and records the procession of requests.
Each one goes there with his strategy for convincing the all-mighty: posture,
snobbery, humor, meanness, spite, aggressiveness, wounded pride. Like in a
famous and similar sequence from Scorsese’s After Hours, it is Kafka that we think
of, and likewise returned to his comedy, which is to say in his real violence that is
descriptive and merciless, in direct drive with the arbitrary of the application of the
law. In the image of these low-reliefs with the circumference of certain ancient
sarcophagi, Pandore lets unfold a little crowd of night revelers who nudge each
other forward in search of election. (NF & JPR)