Noémie Lvovsky returns her forty heroine in her years of adolescence. A space-time shock worthy of a fairy tale.
by Jacques Mandelbaum
Who has never been charmed by the spells of a time trip? Noémie Lvovsky pays, with Camille Redouble, a tight tribute to the beautiful film by Coppola Peggy Sue married (1986, the story of a woman reviving her youth without having rejuvenated).
Or Camille (Noémie Lvovsky), a mother in his forties in the last degree of perdition. A cleaning that explodes in full flight, a moderately comforting job, a faltering psychic stability. We do not clearly see what could, there, immediately, like that, save him the bet.
Now, see how things are done, it turns out that it is the evening of Christmas Eve. And that an old girlfriend invites Camille to a costumed evening where all the elders of the school will be brought together. She goes straight there. After a short detour to the jeweler, just to have his pendulum put himself on time and saw his alliance. The man runs. He looks like Jean-Pierre Léaud, who is more and more like Antonin Artaud, the wildest and shamanic of French poets.
At midnight, while she throws her alliance through the window, Camille falls into apples and wakes up one morning in 1985. This spatio-temporal shock, worthy of a fairy tale, reveals her in A hospital bed after a bit of a bit of a bit. Camille, while remaining historically, physically and mentally the forties we know, has become the punkette of her years of adolescence at the same time.
This distancing effect which sees an adult character playing the adolescent that he was does not serve to feed the humor of the situation, although the film is not devoid. It is rather a pretext for a kind of familiar strangeness, of awake dream, source of meditation full of melancholy. Its main reason is summed up as follows: assuming that we have the opportunity to return to the past, could we modify our future?
Camille will it avoid being seduced by her future husband Eric (Samir Guesmi), which she knows will make her unhappy? Will she prevent her mother, on the day and at the time that she only knows too much, to fall stiff in her kitchen? Will she have the possibility of repairing the evil she has done, indifference, the penalty she felt?
All the beauty of this film, which is the opposite of an uchrony, consists in answering these questions in the negative, while suggesting that something of this order is still being accomplished before our eyes . The infinitely moving scene where Camille tells her mother that she loves her, a few moments before the dreaded moment of her death, claims to be considered as a founding image of reason and the very existence of the film.
Noémie LVOVSKY resonates in the cinema of French author a small music which belongs only to her. A joyful harmony whose hiccup would be the key.