La Rencontre

Alain Cavalier's latest film is deceptively simple and yet revolutionary because it seems to stand outside the boundaries of narrative and documentary filmmaking. One could describe "La Rencontre" as a cinematic diary--a home movie that documents the filmmaker and his muse during the course of their relationship. But unlike most movies the human subjects here are never photographed in whole, just partially. This brave new work is as much about Cavalier's object of desire, that is, his lover as it is about the medium that gives expression to his love. It is conceived as one part confessional and one part discourse on the metaphysics of love and cinema. The cinema, for Cavalier, is like a two-way mirror that records images while reflecting those images back onto itself. Subject and object appear to mirror each other's identity until they assume new personae in the process.

The immediate challenge for Cavalier, then, is cinema's objective gaze: the ability of the camera to record the physical nature of reality. But Cavalier's chief interest is just the opposite. He wants to demonstrate the possibility of a new cinema: one that evolves out of concealment and subterfuge. This cinema deemphasizes the human landscape and dislocates the image from its voice. It focuses inward rather than outward, and chooses to explore the intangible and the abstract over the tactile and the concrete.

Appropriately, Cavalier's cine-diary unfolds like an open book: his twin loves (muse and cinema) are illuminated through a series of tableaux filled with close-up objects which are brought vividly to life by the imagination and the transfigurative power of the cinema. It is as if these everyday objects have become the lovers' collective memories saturated with the emotions and energy of life. In short these objects have assumed a life of their own becoming humanized and perhaps immortalized in the process. After all isn't this precisely the paradox of cinema--the ability to resurrect inanimate objects, to bring them back to life at 24 frames per second?

After ten minutes of this nonsense, I wanted to get out... unfortunately I was in the middle of the row. Also being an optimist, I thought.. It cannot last long... something will happen... anything !! I was wrong. It's worse than bad. It is nothing. There is no actors, no dialog, nothing to look at unless you enjoy the contemplation of a pair of glasses on a table for 5 minutes. My only reaction ?? Never again please !

Cavalier dispenses with two of the cinema's most seductive tools: the human face, and conventional narrative. It's a film about (very loosely) a relationship, told entirely through voice-overs by the two participants, spoken over largely static images (of household objects, animals, parts of the body, rooms, landscapes etc.). At times an emotional direction emerges (an articulation of love, loss, frustration), then it retreats. At times the film seems to be about its own making; at others it seems merely to drift. It defeated my patience. For much of the time, it might as well be basing its art on the idea that a ton of bricks thrown up into the air would land in the shape of a house. You smell coherence, but suspect it's just a pattern in the clouds. Like a poem, it'd need multiple viewings (and being 75 minutes long helps in that respect anyway). But that's not how most of us watch movies. It's not necessarily that we want an easy fix, but we want the movie to breathe on screen, not just in our imaginations. Cavalier's film is deeply passive: it reduces cinema to a static, almost feeble medium. La Rencontre is several degrees of deprivation too many.