The first part of the autobiographical trilogy by an unsung French master: the Russian premiere of the film will take place at Garage Auditorium.
The protagonist of the minimalist film played by Alain Cavalier himself, Mr. Henri, is a recluse with head covered in bandages who roams the many rooms of his Paris apartment. After the death of his wife Catherine, his bandages seem to be the only thing that makes him visible to others. He gives away his books, as words have lost their meaning to him, paints pictures on unhinged doors, breaks the furniture to make a fire in the living room, and eventually paints all the surfaces, including the windows, black. Two voices—one female, one male—give a tour of the apartment, gradually reconstructing the man’s story.
In 1972, in an incident that shaped Alain Cavalier’s career in the years that followed, his wife, actress Irène Tunc died in a car accident. In This Answering Service Takes No Messages—the first part of his autobiographical trilogy that later continued with La Rencontre (1996) and Le filmeur (2005)—Cavalier radically moved away from the style of his previous work and shifted the accent from the clear plots of his genre films to the very process of creating a narrative. He produced a structuralist film with a non-linear storyline in the style of Alain Resnais—poetic as much as it is eccentric.
In part, This Answering Service belongs to the tradition of Chris Marker, as Cavalier returns to his wife through photography; and in part, a meticulous study of a lived space brings to mind the films of Chantal Akerman, in which water meters and water pipes, a bidet and a carpet beater live their own lives. Mixing in an abstract story the drawings of his wife with excerpts from her letters, the footage from the family archive, and fragments from his previous films, Cavalier has created a meditation on the fragmentary and impossible nature of the past. The memories were so painful that the director had to invent an alter ego and speak of himself in the third person—as if those events had happened to someone else.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
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This Answering Service Takes No Messages
Director: Alain Cavalier
France, 1978. 77 min. 16+