Salammbô

If there are pessimists, optimists and realists, Mandico is a realistic director; championship. Make no mistake, the subject of his work, its motif, is not fiction. Neither nostalgia nor osteoporosis nor Salammbó's flaccidity or wrinkles are unicorn horns that the author of LA RÉSURRECTION DES NATURES MORTES has invented. In one of my favorite Nouvelle Vague tapes, Les godelureaux de Chabrol, while an old woman puts on a pitiful vodeville-style show in a private gathering, Ambroisine tells Ronald "this is horrible", I saw, yes, he replies, and she insists "She is very old", then Jean-Claude Brialy smiles mischievously and replies "old age awaits us all ... everything that does not disturb is dishonest". This is Mandico, always determined to remind ourselves of everything that we are pretending not to have, or we hide or hide even our own siblings or children, from a mania, a wart, breath or the secret desire to suck a finger and everything else that follow him. His bygone fruit, his forgotten muse is Flaubert's Salammbó who unleashed so much eroticism in his good days in Carthage, but the director could take Helen of Troy or Cleopatra: resignation or disappointment would have been the same corollary! I applaud Mandico, someone has to make this cinema that others do not dare.