It is customary to mock the paragon of a slow Helvetic cinema, loving in a dripping pathos, totally airtight. If many examples come to reverse this basic idea – we were recently talking about Horrific short films, of the smear Mad Heidi different documentaries – 99 Moons He too seemed to want to kick in this clean old image. But in the end, what does the Swiss-German translation of the Love of Gaspar Noah on the icy shores of Lake Zürich?
99 moons
Bigna (Valentina Di Pace) studies ways to prevent earthquakes. A leading scientist, keeping to life as well as to work a complete control over what surrounds him. Her sexuality will be no exception, as she boils down to incartades of a violent fuck, surprisingly staged with the complicity of one night shots gleaned on the Internet. It is in this carcan that she will meet Frank (Dominik Fellmann), an unworked bartender-DJ who will immediately succumb to the charms of the dominating scientist. We will follow their story(s), between excesses and frequent perditions in artificial paradises, for 99 moons, or about 8 years.
Jan Gassmann, a Swiss director known mainly for Europe, She Loves in 2016, back on the front of the Swiss and international cinema scene, being selected in Cannes for the ACID 2022. Two hours of an unusual love story, alternating long nightclub scenes and passages of more than explicit sexuality, exploring a love 2.0 and all the pitfalls emancipating the road of such a couple: the kinks, the birth of feelings, deception, the exploration of a troubling sexual past, the desire of a child...
The director has used us to working at the confluences of fiction and documentary, and 99 Moons Some passages (Bigna's scientific life), the first segment of the film, the recurrent use of non-professional actors, are on the side of a sometimes quasi-documentary realism.
A seismic love
The filming of these parts can destabilize the viewer, unshakeable by a sometimes too clean image, with a television production stamp. Yet, quickly, Gassmann will intercalate much more stylized portions, whether it be quasi-frenetic dances in a underground basement, rocked with techno, or parts of the legs in the air much more licked visually.
The camera is going to question the reflection, the reverberation games, the mirrors, like a questioning to the two protagonists that an exacerbated libido has brought together but that end up locking in a spiral of attraction/repulsion that will cross the entire film, like seismic waves.
Unannounced, unpredictable earthquakes – despite the search by Brigna for a pattern – and yet inevitable: just like the tides of desire in which this couple is locked. Between visceral hatred and pathological love, the ecstatic sex seems to have built between them an unfailing bond which, while it diminishes, tends to invisibilize, will always end – as a spring – to unite these two souls again in pain. Sacred reunions by two real earthquakes, whose scope is poetic, and which complete the metaphor of this sentimental seismograph.
Life lines
But if we were to talk about reflections, mirror images, it is that the feature film reveals the multiple lines of destiny that could have been borrowed from our two protagonists, as an authorized glance at the alternative realities to which they would have led. Brilliant science? A woman of a ventripotent bourgeois? Or solitaire moat giving short and futile supplements of soul braded in a few strokes of basins at the back of a box ill-famished? The choices are tough, the desires are televised, repulsed to better magnetize again.
A violent film, sometimes with a very Zurichish coldness, sometimes burning with brutal eroticism, probably not denying the influence of a 9 Songs of Michael Winterbottom, nor that, already mentioned, of the Love of Noah. In short, a non- banal film proposal, suggesting the sounds of the Swiss-German dialect while exploring the very bottom of human impulses, which should be discovered on a large screen if you still have the chance.
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
