The portrait of a tormented tragedian. While she focuses on taking care of her teenage son, fragments of buried trauma slowly resurface.
Theatre and love, once again. The stage and its heavy curtains as a backdrop to the crystallization of psychological disorders. As Vecchiali grew older, his cinema moved ever closer to the most intimate spheres of domestic life. Not sexuality really, since it is the only element here that does not seem to be a problem, except in so far as accepting that your spouse is cheating on you may be considered a sign that you are somewhat detached from others and from the world. Un soupçon d’amour may be seen as a director’s answer to another, namely Cassavetes, whose films Vecchiali found narcissistic, demonstrative and – under the pretext of independence – prone to the most American form of efficiency. Or, as the character of the stage director puts it: “A rational actress is a bad actress who watches herself play.” One may not agree with these harsh remarks, from one maverick director to another. Yet it says a lot about Vecchiali’s own perspective. In order to draw the portrait of a woman under the influence, Vecchiali has always favoured artifice as a lightning device, mirrors as a means of transport into a character’s psyche, plays on language as a dynamic prudishness of exchanges, and melodrama as ethos. Hence the implacable gentleness of the camera moves; as they make their way towards the bodies, they drain the shots from their sunny sitcom-like substance and from the staging designed by the characters, all this to capture this moment of truth when words suddenly fail us. In between images, crime and sci-fi vibes resonate as harmonics, to better bring us back to that essential question: how can we live with death?
DB
