Irène

Irène is a video diary from director Alain Cavalier, an investigation of his undiminished grief following the death of his wife Irène Tunc back in the 1970s. Cavalier as a director of feature films within the mainstream French film industry, has been an almost failure. Debuting as a helmer he made two star-led movies, working with the likes of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, but employing rather obscure and uninteresting political plots. Never really managing to shift gears, he suffered a long career break following the death in her prime of model, actress, and his wife, Irène (in the film he mentions her once making a jibe that he was not a director of the top drawer). Without the solitary success of his eponymous biopic of St Thérèse Lisieux, which won the César for best film and also the Jury prize at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, he may have been considered an interesting failure.

However we also have film diarist Alain Cavalier, altogether of more interest, who is allowed full rein to his obsessions when working on his own, working with economy and ingenuity. At his heart he is revealed an admirer and pedestaller of women, having frequent conversations with a poster of Sophie Marceau, an actress he admits to never having met. Indeed if you watch his first feature as director, Le combat dans l'île, it seems that his sole driving concern is to film as much of Romy Schneider's beauty and energy as possible, with any other element of the production relegated to distant last place. His marriage is an epitome of this, having chosen to wed a literal Miss France in Irène Tunc. His view is summed up by his intonation of, "Oh beautiful woman, intelligent and lively, who confirms the planet's faith in the quality of the human race." Beautiful women are his reason to live.

Working with almost no means, with a cheap digital camera and shooting empty hotel rooms and inside the houses of friends, he does somehow manage quite a lot of magic, proof that there is some real talent here. There are moments where his booming voice and hieratic prognostications verge on pretentiousness, and some scenes are almost staggeringly objectifying. Yet his stark honesty manages to carry proceedings forward, as well as a series of well-spaced emotional revelations that keeps the work from monotony. Cavalier really is bearing all here, and I cannot think of any movie that is more intimate.

It's very difficult indeed to make a movie about memories of real facts and people but Alain Cavalier manages to do it and if he didn't make a masterpiece (almost impossible with this theme) he at least makes a good movie or as good as the theme allows. Cavalier's wife Irène died in 1972 in a car accident (accident or suicide?) and in this movie he talks and talks about the past while revisiting places where he was with his wife, trying to solve almost psycho-analytically the problems he carries in his mind about what had been their life together and to explain us and himself how she behaved and why she behaved like that and what could have been the cause of her death. Their relationship was one of deep love but not free of problems and even conflicts. His mind is a bit confused even after all these years and he still has her present on his mind almost like if she were still alive. The movie develops itself slowly through permanent recollection of past events and conversations between the two in an attempt to understand how it was and what had happened during their life together. Many people may find the movie dull and boring unless they tune in to the spirit of someone who has lost a loved one and still cannot understand well what has happened and why.