The urgency of a situation (offering a film to an actor friend who is terminally ill) and the will to rise up against the stupidity of politicians (Charles Pasqua saying that AIDS was God’s way to punish the homosexual) informed Vecchiali’s initial impulse for what seems to be a provisional assessment of his work, a film entirely driven by the expression of a distraught feeling that dictates the time and space organisation of this tragic and trivial opera. The film focuses on ten moments in the life of Louis, shot throughout ten years, a full existential cycle in a man’s life. These are the pivotal scenes in the personal journey of a middle-aged man, from the collapse of his bourgeois relationship to his final breath. It starts with the chromatic saturation in the couple’s bedroom, where Louis is suffocating next to the burning hot body of a wife he no longer desires, with, for sole convergent lines, two double doors that allow the story to time travel while remaining anchored to this space. With the sequence shot as a showcase, and the dramatized flow of the prosody as the only form of writing capable of choreographing at the proper distance these contradictory sensory waves that make the character in turns withdraw from the world or embrace it passionately. With lyrical intensity, the film draws into its own movement all the off-screen, off-time and off-editing elements it feeds on. “The world is moving. You don’t feel it moving when you move along with it”. Louis’ words echo the director’s motto. By choosing to film love to death, head on, Vecchiali defies society’s judgmental gaze and endows this generational tale with universal relevance.
DB
