Rafael Palacio Illingworth
Life begins, life ends. A title so elliptic that it is reduced to a law of nature, stripping
family misfortune of its tragic nature. Death is a private tragedy. How can you
capture the horror of its irrationality? Rafael Palacio Illingworth is the director of
several comedy dramas including Between Us (2016) and Macho (2009). Here, he
signs a feature film that is at once intimate, honest and generous, based on the
tragedy that shook his own life. By weaving personal material, gathered over time,
into a fictional narrative, he goes beyond a purely autobiographical framework,
constantly playing with its codes.
Rafael Palacio Illingworth forges an alter ego, a doppelgänger and a family
reflection. The images of radiant, everyday happiness are matched by a fragmented
narrative that condenses a descent into hell, revealing pain. Fiction plays a role:
that of preserving these images of this happiness. He thus ensures the memories
remain intact, instilling them with a sense of grace. The dramatization of his play
replaces the muted brutality of real life. Here, the director’s body must withstand.
In the face of illness. Against despair. There, his character’s body, a gaucho from the
plains of Argentina, self-inflicts the henceforth unbearable violence of a world and
consecrates the fictional space as a catharsis.
Intertwining different regimes in three movements, Rafael Palacio Illingworth
courageously exposes himself on several levels. The duplication becomes a
dialogue. He stages his own family to better reveal the contours of drama as a
genre, through a system of dialogue between fiction and the mechanisms of its
production: sources of inspiration, musical score, characters and motifs, peaks and
climaxes… It is not the evidence of a tragedy that is thus revealed, but the vibrant
meeting of art and life. (Claire Lasolle)