“Olaf is missing. He only left his lover Marie with a box of tapes with
hundreds of hours of rushes (the last seven years of his life), together with
a notebook. Marie decides to investigate. Day in day out, she views these
pictures, these fragments of a life, and attempts to reconstruct the journey
of the man she loves so as to better understand his departure.” Such is the
synopsis of the film as given by its director. Under the guise of fiction, it will
not be too hard to make out a distorted self-portrait in this Richness for
anyone who has knowledge of the filmography and career of Damien Odoul,
one of the most original and powerful French authors right from his first
feature film in 2001, Le Souffle.
Paradoxically although the person portrayed is almost never to be seen on
screen (here this escape is actually at work, except for a few fleeting shots
here and there, evanescent reflections in glasses, etc.), it is to better show
that he refuses to distance himself from what is filmed. Images of the world
exemplarily and obsessively gathered in France and Japan, in cities and in
the country, at night and by day, among the disabled and in the middle of
childhood. Thus he tells his own story through pasting together what the eye
has seen and simultaneously recorded. A sharp, live memory unfolding like
a life in pictures, away from taking stock, more akin to a confession which
never lifts the veil on anything, not even on the passionate act of filmmaking.
(JPR)