Irène is a film made literally by one person – a video diary shot and recorded by the filmmaker – using little more than his imagination and the happenstance and flow of the everyday, finally layering in a lifetime of memories. In this case, the filmmaker is Alain Cavalier, best known for the exquisite Thérèse (86). Here, as in his last film, Le Filmeur (05), he distils cinema to one man shooting what some would describe as home movies, but the effect realizes Alexandre Astruc's bold notion of the camera becoming like a pen in the hands of a master. Cavalier's tiny home-video camera emerges as the most intimate tool of communication, accompanied by his raspy, aged voice, which guides us through parts of his present – and his past.
Cavalier is now seventy-eight and in a reflective mood. As sequence follows sequence, he gradually opens up his memory chest, passing his field of view over his apartment, amusingly confessing his admiration for the actress Sophie Marceau, whom he has never met, and wondering if he should give her a call, before arriving at the true subject of this painfully touching self-portrait – his marriage. Flipping through his decades-old diaries, Cavalier slowly removes the veil on his relationship with his first wife, who was tragically killed in a car accident in 1972. He struggles to make sense of his love for the beautiful, vivacious Irène, attempting to bring closure to their relationship and her death by laying bare some of the deepest intimacies of their time together. Amid the reveries, he is also made rudely aware of the present and the vulnerability of his own fragile body.
As Cavalier revisits his past through photographs and the text of his diaries, we witness a man grappling to fully comprehend, as much as anyone can, the mysteries of a lover and the circumstances that surrounded her fateful accident. This intimacy could be embarrassing in the hands of a lesser artist, but Irène contains such moments of sublimity that it ultimately transports us to a state of grace. Using the simplest of means, employing only his field of vision and his memories, Cavalier has created a modest masterpiece.
Piers Handling
Alain Cavalier is a French filmmaker who attended the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques and made his feature-length debut in 1962 with
Le Combat dans l' î le. He followed this with several more features, including
La Chamade (68),
Le Plein de super (75),
Thérèse, which screened at the 1986 Festival,
Libera me (93), which screened at the Festival in 1993 and
Le Filmeur (05).
Irène (09) is his latest film.