The director of Goodbye to the Queen Adhesive to the Basques of Huppert and Luchini in this documentary in diptych, shot in the enclosure of the Avignon festival in 2021. Trac, cicada froufrou and Pope city, it is high time to (re)see By hearts thanks to its physical format output.
Isabelle boude
The film opens on the cicada stridulations. The summer, of course, and the winding roads of Provence. A lonely car leads Isabelle Huppert between the ramparts of Avignon, where she prepares to stage to perform Cherry of Chekhov. This central phrase already exists between his lips: « The misfortune seems so implausible to me that I even come to know what to think, I lose myself ». Nuclear in the spirit of the actress who seems to be polarizing on this agglomerate of words that his language hardly manages to pronounce.
Huppert does Huppert. Embarrassed by this camera that glues it and pretends to ignore – unlike Luchini – it sometimes irritates by its haughty mimics, constant contradictions, palpable preciosity. However, the strength of the director Benoît Jacquot is, like the actress, to focus the first part of her diptych on this sentence that Huppert resolutely fails to return. We forget the trembling camera and the sometimes hard-captured sound, as the tension that was born during these minutes before the stage climb is taking place.
Huppert in the realm of air currents
Better, the actress's shell is undeniably broken by the very ecosystem in which it evolves: behind the scenes of a theatre. True realm of air currents, where nothing seems closed, where draperies replace doors, where at each opening appear and then disappear technicians increasingly resembling ghosts. The intimacy does not exist and it is there, paradoxically, that the camera is about to capture the artist in his total abandonment.
One then sees a real torture of the mind, tied between noisy pieces, crushed by the echo of a stone carcan, where concentration is necessary but impossible. From there, the tension, skilfully knit by the director, was again highlighted by the very construction of the documentary: the film focused on the sentence mentioned above, the one that stuck. And of his theatrical performance we will only see this segment, where we inevitably understand the stumbles of Huppert, the tongue that forks, the mistakes that slip into the text. The spectator is carried by this tension, feels to the guts the trac which sucks from the face of the actress, feels his guts twisted when, in front of the public, Huppert performs his slippings (in the end largely controlled).
Luchini soliloque
Then at the mid-point, the film abandons the actress and then looks at the second central personality of the documentary, Fabrice Luchini. And if Huppert did Huppert, Luchini undeniably does Luchini. He gets lost in endless – and sometimes exciting – disgressions, speaks loudly, too loudly, enriches the text which he flows with abundant remarks. Huppert's antithesis on his legs, he performs the show, takes part in the camera, totally plays it. Again, the film sometimes stretches a little too much and leaves it overabundantly wandering. If one loses the construction of tension that existed in the Huppert segment, however, one better understands the will of Luchini to offer the texts of Nietzsche, Baudelaire et al.
« Je fais ça par volonté modeste de transmettre l’éblouissement que m’a donné la sensation de comprendre. Quand tu ouvres un livre de philosophie, en général, tu comprends rien. Lire Nietzsche, tu comprends pas grand-chose non plus mais t’es pris par ce séducteur […] »
En somme, le documentaire est branlant, tantôt redondant, parfois agaçant, mais Benoît Jacquot parvient dans chacune de ses deux parties à tirer le plus intéressant de cette étape que l’on ne voit jamais : ce qui se passe avant la montée sur scène. Inspiré par Raymond Depardon, reprenant un dispositif que le réalisateur avait déjà utilisé avec Luchini pour un film mis au singulier (Par cœur, en 1997), By hearts est un petit documentaire sur les coulisses du métier de comédien qu’il convient de (re)découvrir à l’aune de sa sortie en format physique.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Durée : 76 min
Release Date: June 20, 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 1.85
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
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