Penelope my love is an assemblage of archive images sewn by the voice of Claire Doyon, filmmaker but especially mother. Created as a letter yelling at her love for her autistic daughter, Penelope, the film goes from the joy of birth to the uppercut of diagnosis, slaloming between all stages of a life not like the others.
Film Patchwork
The film project is special and has sprouted, even from the filmmaker's admission, relatively late: during storage, it falls on a closet full of 15 years of Penelope's life. Claire Doyon will then begin to clear up this manna of images, alternating miniDV (the DV, Digital Video, being this format initiating the transition to digital to the so particular stamp, explored notably by Lynch in Inland Empire), Super 8 reels but also HD. It will then gather these parts of life, in chronological order or almost: Penelope my love beginning with the announcement of the overflow, the impossibility of living together, the necessary separation between mother and daughter. An immediately poignant plan, a heart-cure that robs the spectator of any hope of « healing ».
Because Penelope my loveIf he explores the desire for healing, he never makes it his narrative spring. Penelope will not be better, the very first shot of the film announces us from the outset. On the contrary, what we follow throughout the documentary is the gestation of a look, the stratification of the desires of his parents and more particularly of his mother: first a denial as to what affects his daughter, then the horribly brutal announcement of the diagnosis, immediately the will to heal (and the multiplication of hopes, first medical, then more and more esoteric as imposed by the ineluctable), « War » as the mother calls, then finally acceptance of the other and his differences.
Cinema as the only defense
Because Claire Doyon has not turned to cinema to highlight her daughter's life: a FEMIS graduate, she is already a director of many internationally recognized films and short films. We could quote Katai, The Dark Allies, Arsenic, Chrishna/Ombwirior Penelope who was already focusing on her daughter and a trip to Mongolia with her. A highlight of this documentary, where agitation and disorderly gestures seem gradually to calm down in the face of nature, grandiose landscapes, contact with these children of another normality than that prevailing in metropolitan France.
« The camera is a shield that protects us from the eyes of others. It's also the weapon that allows me to resist. »
Cinema as a generator of poetry
An exciting translation of a-normality into another form of normality, which the camera allows to capture: stereotyped gestures become, in front of the Doyon lens, a dance. His words are poetry. And despite the horror of certain segments – a visceral horror, described by the filmmaker's white voice – and the inevitable end announced from the beginning of the feature film, despite the despair that was reflected in certain scenes, the camera allows Doyon to hold. To create meaning. And above all it revokes this language made impossible, highlighting the silent words of Penelope. The image lets us see landscapes that we others « normopaths » can hardly imagine and redraw the contours of what we call « Normality ».
A film to bring closer to the poignant Do you know why I jump?, where cinema allows us to create a mind map of autistic people to invite us to understand their world. Escaped from all essentialization, alternating between poetry and despair, between lights and darkness, Penelope my love shakes his spectator on a subject that has rarely been seen as well treated in cinema. A master documentary, to be (re)discovered in physical format.
In addition to Penelope my love, short film Is Raining Cats and Dogs (as a bonus in the DVD edition), in which Claire Doyon talks with an adult autistic Asperger, allows them to understand their perception of the world and how it exists.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 88 min
Release date: 02 May 2023
Video format : 576p/25 – 1.37 and 1.78
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
[...] visible pain, another times more. And they question our normality, like Penelope my love where Claire Doyon films with a poignant tenderness of her daughter's autism. And according to [...]