It is all about films. It is all about discovering new images, new sensibilities, new characters, and new stories – sometimes-. It is all about feeling something, no matter what it is – sadness, happiness, melancholy, embarrassment, joy, fear -. As I grow up, I realize most films have not affected me. Of course, there are the ones that made me want to become who I am, films that gave me such an envy to be part of the 7th Art that I am now "working" in this field, but what saddens me is that I forget the films I see. With this whole year abroad interning in the cinema industry, I get to see so many that it is sometimes hard to remember them very clearly. But if I keep in mind a single dialogue, a song or a scene, it means that there was something in it, that the director, the actors, the cinematographer, the entire crew, have made their job.
All this because I want to say more about a film I saw yesterday. MEMORY LANE (2010) is a French film directed by Mikhael Hers. It stars Thibault Vinçon, Lolita Chammah, Dounia Sichov (among many actors that were all good). If some will write or tell that it was a film in which nothing happens, I will have to agree with them. Because nothing spectacular, disturbing, unexpected, happens. It is a film about growing up, about death, about family, about love, about depression, about friendship. It is a film about life, as simple (or as complex) as it may be.
A group of twentysomethings comes back to the city where they all grew up together, the time of a summer. They get to see each other again and to realize how they’re growing apart, growing closer, growing. Some of them fall in love, others fall apart.
An off screen voice at the beginning and at the end – one of the main character’s – reads us a letter written to a friend, apologizing for not giving enough news, noticing how different things are when time hits adulthood and buries childhood forever. It is a film about melancholy, about ordinary people, about ordinary lives. A film in which it is not necessary to speak to feel things. And to me, it is the commonplace nature of its topic that makes it so extraordinary and so human.
In a certain way, it made me think of another film I saw years ago, at the VCU French Film Festival of Richmond, in Virginia, and that I saw again not so long ago. It is called “Poison Friends” (Les Amitiés Maléfiques) and Emmanuel Bourdieu directed it in 2006. I guess the fact that Thibault Vinçon is also one of the main characters in this film has something to do with the connection I make between them two. However, the mood, the way of dealing with the end of childhood and the evolution – sometimes the death – of friendship, seemed quite similar to me. Similar doesn’t mean identical – Poison Friends is about the rivalry of cultivated males in the literary world – but in their strangeness, they made me feel something. A kind of spleen maybe, because I might not be ready to grow up myself.
MJ.
