The third part of Alain Cavalier’s autobiographical trilogy is a diary film shot over ten years. The Russian premiere of the film will take place at Garage Auditorium.
For the final part of the trilogy that also includes This Answering Service Takes No Messages (1978) and La Rencontre (1996), French filmmaker Alain Cavalier recorded his life with his partner, muse, and collaborator Françoise Widhoff over ten years. The picture inspired by the intimate tone of the American avant-garde artists Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Barbara Hammer follows Françoise everywhere: reading a Simenon crime novel, returning from an oncologist, and naked in bed. Not only does he become a voyeur, but also an exhibitionist: if in This Answering Service Cavalier hid his face behind bandages and only briefly revealed it in La Rencontre, here he shows himself in the most vulnerable state: after an operation that had the skin from his ear transplanted onto his nose.
Looking for natural, undirected life, Cavalier’s camera travels everywhere: to the seashore and a theatre backstage, to a hotel room in Aix-en-Provence, where Michelangelo Antonioni had once stopped, and to the studio of the artist Christian Boltanski who appears in a cameo. The discrete storyline that follows Cavalier as he travels the country with his films brings to mind Chantal Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna (1978), whose protagonist also travels around Europe to promote her new film. But Cavalier’s tone is more relaxed and tongue-in-cheek. “I made a film for tuppence ha'penny, scraping and saving,” he admitted. “I've come to show it at a festival... I've been put in a very expensive room.” While Françoise Widhoff, in the next hotel room, tries to sell his film to Roger Diamantis, the owner of the famous Paris cinema Saint-André des Arts, Cavalier is washing his underpants in their bathroom. In this treasury of memories, every viewer will find something to their liking, whether it is the loving shots of the filmmaker’s mother who is approaching her 100th birthday, or the reminiscences from Cavalier’s earlier films: Le Combat dans l'île (1962) with Romy Schneider and Thérèse (1986) that brought him a César Award.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
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Le filmeur
Director Alain Cavalier
France, 2005. 97 min. 18+