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"Or: One Can't Think of Nothing." The letter sorter (Philippe Marlaud) works at night, during the day he chases his paranoia in between naps. His girlfriend (Marie Rivière) is independent, irritable and in need of a plumber, he catches her leaving her building with the pilot ex (Mathieu Carrière) and la jalousie, as Robbe-Grillet would say, takes hold. "A good sense of direction" is what we tell ourselves while lost in our own mazes, still the Paris that was gray and grainy at the onset grows suffused with sunlight as the protagonist's impulsive pursuit leads him to the Parc de Buttes-Chaumont. The frisky teen turned accomplice (Anne-Laure Meury) has his number: "You're dreaming up a movie about a total stranger." Eric Rohmer and "problèmes de coeur," a matter of deduction and mathematics and offhand bursts of devastating emotion. The protagonist believes in idealized romance and is wont to doze off in cafés, his girlfriend feels the early pangs of twentysomething anxiety and can't quite enjoy her bed. By contrast, Meury's spirited forest sprite is all light and insouciance, gamely inventing a fetish in order to borrow a tourist's Polaroid camera. ("These French girls are crazier than I thought," chuckles the sightseer.) Leads and feints, assumptions and half-truths, a titular character who appears only in a photograph, maybe. An obsessive quest or just something to do in the afternoon? "Personally, I like life when it's most like a novel." Shaft at Antonioni's Blowup, kinship to Godard's "Montparnasse-Levallois" (Paris vu par...). The couple's marathon tête-à-tête in the bedroom, the sleepwalker's postcard stamped and sent. If Bresson directed screwball comedies... "You'd make a great cop. Or maybe not, you always miss the point." It ends with a chanson for the city, at once teeming and desolate in freeze-frame. With Philippe Caroit, Coralie Clément, Lisa Heredia, María Luisa García, Haydée Caillot, Rosette, and Fabrice Luchini.
--- Fernando F. Croce |