After Femmes Femmes, Trous de mémoire marks the second important turning point in Vecchiali’s career. A man and a woman meet again in the present and conjure up the past, in order to build, perhaps, a potential future. The impromptu for two characters announced by the subtitle points to an apparent distance from the kinetic fascination and its complex machinery. By moving to television the popular imagery and the novelistic structures of his previous films, the director opens a new work space, like an offspring of his Lettre d’un cinéaste: first person singular, intimate surfaces and words, continuous breath, bodies and voices hanging onto each other’s quiver. A perfect combination of bodies and sets (a riverfront on a cold, sunny winter day), a triple unity at odds with the mise-en-scène. The single place and plot create the illusion that the film is made of a single sequence shot, when in fact there are many cuts. Each splice deepens the mystery. Who are Paul and Françoise? Vecchiali and Lebrun? Fictional characters? Fictional bodies of undetermined status that fight less for their filmic love than for the control of an improvised text, which is organised in a three-time structure punctuated with various reference points. The camera makes itself inconspicuous, looking out for the suspense created by the light over the characters’ faces, or by the halting speech. And from within the frame, Vecchiali, a fake actor but a true director, records time itself as it brings together and then breaks up the couple, and he captures the two-voice work between a director and his actors.
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