Les grands squelettes

In Paris, on a spring day, a man wearing a jacket is lying on the ground. If he gets up again, it’s without quite knowing why he fell in the first place. His thoughts come to us drifting quickly, going back to the moment he woke up, his wife asleep in the curtains’ shade… Behind the clothes façade, and the work façade, the big skeletons are a crowd of individuals lost in their thoughts. Philippe Ramos radically submits fiction to the unpredictable and secret rhythm of rêverie. A drift with no barriers and no judges: simple words devoted to love, desire or sex unrelentingly come around. Anguish makes itself discrete, yet ever-present. Philippe Ramos composes this film mainly with stills, glimpses of fleeting atmospheres (the freshness of a glasshouse, a hand touching us…), a fixity, however, escaping the overflow of beauty. Melvil Poupaud, Françoise Lebrun, Jacques Bonnaffé, Jean-François Stévenin, Jacques Nolot, Denis Lavant, Anne Azoulay, Alice de Lencquesaing… all very impressive, their bodies still bathing in everyday light, in all sobriety. At that very moment they seem to be more fragile and familiar at once. At that moment, too, rarefied movement becomes more precious. Barely sketched-out gestures, wind simply blowing, a few photograms – just enough to show what separates loving movement from approaching death. With this film speaking in choral accents, where every actor misses each other by just a touch, Philippe Ramos traces the path of our solitudes large and small. Present in the deepest of sleep, they follow the big skeletons in their everyday life, before their reception of the world. They also restore the brilliance of happiness as soon as it is announced. (VP)