A very nice and touching film by Honoré, its resonances with the works of Truffaut, Eustache, Garrell, are obvious and magnificent (the Garrell and Truffaut links are even physically enacted in the presence of young Louis, an updated version of Jean-Pierre Léaud, his godfather): Narcissism and suicide, narcissism as suicide, as well as its antidote.
The Frame: A tableau of the rigorous impossibility of mutual caring and love which isn't, also and at the same time, an act of mutual destruction. And the Truffaut-Desplechin principle: each minute, five new ideas.
The pattern: A man comes back to live in his father's house, where he meets his younger brother, himself in a previous stage. He has played with love and met his match, a woman more powerful than him, more narcissistic, one who managed to play with h i s love. He has come back shattered, back to his childhood house, watching his brother wrecking the lives of young women and identifying with his dead sister, a position he slowly moves into. But by now, his narcissism has become too strong to follow his sister's path, he cannot die (he cannot drown, he swims against his will), he can only move on forward - a flicker of hope - more than a Garrell movie would have ever offered us (and more than the story of the hero's father and mother, the previous generation, seem to offer us) - to a place where love may indeed be possible without one falling apart and a prey to the other in the process. Finally, a journey back in time, a new future - a young weak woman knocks on the door (the bunny meets a frightened, wiser, wolf), will that hope ever materialize?
Recommended.
The Frame: A tableau of the rigorous impossibility of mutual caring and love which isn't, also and at the same time, an act of mutual destruction. And the Truffaut-Desplechin principle: each minute, five new ideas.
The pattern: A man comes back to live in his father's house, where he meets his younger brother, himself in a previous stage. He has played with love and met his match, a woman more powerful than him, more narcissistic, one who managed to play with h i s love. He has come back shattered, back to his childhood house, watching his brother wrecking the lives of young women and identifying with his dead sister, a position he slowly moves into. But by now, his narcissism has become too strong to follow his sister's path, he cannot die (he cannot drown, he swims against his will), he can only move on forward - a flicker of hope - more than a Garrell movie would have ever offered us (and more than the story of the hero's father and mother, the previous generation, seem to offer us) - to a place where love may indeed be possible without one falling apart and a prey to the other in the process. Finally, a journey back in time, a new future - a young weak woman knocks on the door (the bunny meets a frightened, wiser, wolf), will that hope ever materialize?
Recommended.