Country: France
Year: 2004
Duration: 127'
Pascal keeps on putting off his thesis in philosophy. Christine, his girlfriend, doesn’t understand how he can be so relaxed. Sarah is a singer in a Baroque ensemble and Manuel, her boyfriend, supports her. One Christmas, Christine gives a record to Pascal, who thus discovers Sarah’s voice. Oppressed by her dreaded singing teacher, called “the unnamable one,” Sarah quits; Pascal has sunk into a melancholy stupor and has been left by Christine. The two, who are both marked by unhappiness, find themselves sharing their dream of absoluteness. “In a certain sense, the film is about grace, what the Jansenists called ‘efficacious grace’ and which isn’t very different from what the Greeks called ‘necessity’: a strength which comes from the outside and which puts the being on his own path, obliging him to become that which he is. Thus, Sarah transcends the contradictions of her existence in music and it is this very grace which lets Pascal go toward his goal, the Pont des Arts, where, in the blinding midday sunshine, the living and the dead come into contact. Therefore, the film can’t seem ‘dark’ because grace, like film, is light.”
Biography
film director
Eugène Green
(New York, USA, 1947) moved to Paris in 1969, where in 1977 he founded the Théâtre de la Sapience, with which he staged various Baroque and modern plays. He made his directorial debut with Toutes les nuits, Prix Delluc for best debut film in 2001. He then directed Le nom du feu, presented in Locarno in 2002 and distributed together with Le monde vivant, which took part in the Directors' Fortinight. With Correspondances he was awarded in 2007, together with Harun Farocki and Pedro Costa, the special jury prize in Locarno, where he returned to competition in 2009 with A Religiosa Portuguesa and in 2014 with La Sapienza, shot between Switzerland and Italy. In 2011 TFF dedicated a retrospective to him and then went on to program several of his films, such as the documentary filmed in the Basque Country Faire la parole (2015), Le fils de Joseph (2016), which premiered at the Berlinale, and the workshop film En attendant les Barbares (2017). In 2020 he returned to the Basque Country to shoot Atarrabi et Mikelats, which was presented in San Sebastian. In addition to his activity as a director, he also works as a writer and poet.
FILMOGRAFIA
Toutes les nuits (2001), Le nom du feu (cm, 2002), Le monde vivant (2003), Le pont des arts (2004), Les signes (mm, 2006), Digital Sam in Sam Saek 2007: Memories (ep. Corrispondences, mm, 2007), A Religiosa Portuguesa (2009), La sapienza (2014), Faire la parole (doc., 2015), Le fils de Joseph (2016), En attendant les Barbares (2017), Como Fernando Pessoa salvou Portugal (cm, 2017), Lisboa revisitada (cm, 2019). Atarrabi et Mikelats (2020), Le mur des morts (2022).
Cast
& Credits
regia, sceneggiatura/director, screenplay
Eugène Green
fotografia/cinematography
Raphaël O’Byrne
montaggio/film editing
Jean François Elie
scenografia/production design
Pierre Bouillon
musica/music
Le poème harmonique
suono/sound
Frédéric de Ravignan
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Natacha Regnier (Sarah), Adrien Michaux (Pascal), Olivier Gourmet (Meréville), Denis Podalydès (l’innominabile/Unnamable), Camille Carraz (Christine), Alexis Loret (Manuel)
produttore/producer
Martine De Clermont-Tonnerre
produzione, vendita all’estero/production, world sales
Mact Productions
