LA MALADIE BLANCHE

A mild summer night in a village in the Pyrenees, this is the story imagined by
Christelle Lheureux. A party naturally inaugurates this gentle and cheerful extravaganza,
where teenagers celebrate their youth, and some adults having lost it
chase after it. Myrtille, a little girl, is going to go to bed before everyone else, but
not for long: she’s awakened by a wild boar that nicely invites her to follow him.
Together they make their way in the forest to a cave decorated with wall paintings,
until the father’s child finds them in this cave from long ago. With this distant
adaptation of La Belle et La Bête, where other legendary stories dare to make an
intrusion to bid adieu the beauty of life, Christelle Lheureux makes a film of a single
material: grace. Fragile material but here distributed unstintingly, grace becomes
the costume of childhood, of adolescence, the charm too of a big toad, from
shadows to trees, from the light of the moon, grace in the dialogue between
yesterday and today, exchanges between dreaming and waking, between man and
animal. At the service of infinitesimal nuances and with respect for all that enters
into the frame, the selected black and white decides to perfect the picture with
balanced features, for fear of finishing it too quickly, for fear of seeing a mysterious
narrative find its resolution and death arrive too soon. (JPR)