It happens not too often in these last
years of the Berlin Film festival but it still happens. You see a film
without any expectations and to have chosen to see just this very
film is often accidental. Such “accidents” are during a festival
often the most rewarding. That happened to me just last year when I
saw a documentary in the Generation section called Loving Lorna
by Annika and Jessica Karlsson. The few information I had from this
film sounded interesting to me and I had no idea that it turned out
to be one of the most beautiful films I saw last year. And this is
still one of the very few advantages of film festivasl.
Premières
Solitudes consists mostly on conversations between young students
at the eleventh grade of a secondary school in Ivry sur Seine,one of these
prosy suburbs of Paris.
Two
or three of them meet on a place they feel comfortable with and talk
about their lives, their relationship to their parents, love and what
they want to do in the future. Most of them are children of divorced
parents. Some of them like a young woman born in Nigeria lives with a
foster mother. The presence of the camera seems to increase the
relaxed atmosphere. Each of the young protagonist feels free what to
tell and how. The places where they meet are like niches, places at
least one of them likes. One of the miracles in this film is that
these conversations seem never forced. As sober and prosaic the
film´s initiation point is, it develops later into a little universe
of human life with all their stories.
The
presence of these young people leads a life of its own. I assume they
do not just follow only the filmmaker´s concept, they also perform
and it seems they retain the control about what they give away from
their privacy and what not. Some very few shots display the landscape
of this environment, small traces of nature in this mostly very
boring suburb. From time to time the camera finds glimpse of beauty,
engrossed places where some of the protagonists are seen often when
they meet and talk.
The
spirit of security and freedom the film evokes might be fleeting and
often in contrast to the awareness that these young people have
hardly a chance to talk like that at home with their parents.These
fragments of human life appear more and more like landscapes. Except
some few moments when nobody speaks, one feels the presence of the
camera. But mostly the spectator seems to forget it´s presence like
the protagonists.
Days
after I have seen this film, my mind is still full of their stories.
Claire Simon created a strange
zone where the spectator like the
protagonists can move freely. How big the quantity of stories and
information really is, I realized long after I have seen the film.
The restraint formal concept of the
film or even the illusion of the absence of any formal aspect is of
course delusive. The film´s point of view avoids to impost itself as
wiser than what it reveals. This point of view gets finally wiser
through the experience it makes with this piece of world and as the
film proceeds and as the result of experiences it learns permanently.
The film beneficiates itself from moment to moment. It is almost like
I have seen a film is arising in front of my eyes.
The old problem of documentary which
deals with real problems is that one wants to learn as much as
possible from these people but at the same time there is the privacy
of real people to protect. In Premières
Solitudes, it seems the protagonists take this decision in their
own hands.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings:
Sun, 25.2, 12.30 Arsenal
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