“A woman puts up a few friends, without entrusting them with the key to her apartment. Her window overlooks a migrant camp. Her friends come and go. One day, the migrants are gone. The following days, newcomers show up at her apartment. They aren’t migrants.” This is how Pascale Bodet describes her project. These few lines alone give us an idea of the film’s ambition: to conjure the pressing issues of our time, to try and weave them with the delicate fabric of friendships and “company”, without any guarantee, to shake the wings of The Exterminating Angel afresh, without yielding on details about the fragments of life here on display. Because, above all else, the film inconspicuously seems to try to make palpable the random, uncertain material of our lives, between an open door and a closed one. This is why this coveted “apartment” isn’t so much the setting of another Parisian drama as it is a rudimentary theatre stage, divided into a sewing studio, a backstage area, a bedroom, a dormitory, a classroom, a conversation salon, etc. A theatre indeed, because the true head of this place isn’t really the tenant but words themselves: in this cramped, quickly overcrowded space, the Spoken Word flows freely. Not to shine or to fake authenticity, but rather to touch emotionally, to get closer, to learn (a bit), to try and be amazed for once. (JPR)
Pascale Bodet
