The Mediterranean, Mortality, Melodrama, Mother. The director’s most intimate memories are used as raw material in this complex interlacing of three distinct timelines (1930,1945,1963), all unified by the blazing sun of Toulon that bathes every frame of the film. This daytime ghost story is dedicated to Vecchiali’s mother, who passed away during postproduction. The filmmaker’s idol, Danielle Darrieux, puts on the blue silk suit of the heroine, who is in every shot. If only for the time of a quick comeback, or a confession. The year 1963 (also that of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, by his friend and cinema brother, Jacques Demy) is a pivotal date to confront a past that is not reconstructed, but rather visualised in a series of flashes assailing the director’s memory. These obsessional images all get back to the centrifugal force of the family home, haunted by the voice of Philippe Pétain and Charles De Gaulle, the sound of bombardments, the – real or imagined – detonations of a revolver. The film is built on a series of meetings (a cop, some guy down by the harbour, a hotelier, a blind nanny, his lawyer niece, his sister) who question both the past of director’s family and the meanders of French history. In family matters, dramas often arise when people take sides. Vecchiali cleverly avoids the pitfall of Manicheism and becomes in turns an ethnologist, a novelist, a documentary filmmaker, an epistolarian of his own sensations. In doing so, he always surprises us with his ability to multiply speeds and figures (in the narrative and the camera moves), and to set a serial structure that, just like Pollet’s greatest films, examines the subject from all sides without hiding behind the codes of melodrama that still sheltered him a little in Corps à coeur.
DB
