In the film’s seven opening minutes, the eccentric Eugène Green elegantly deploys and condenses the symbolical coordinates of his fifth film: many wide shots of the cathedral that serves as inspiration for the film’s title are accompanied by a choir chant of religious connotations. Next, when receiving an award, the architect played by Fabrizio Rongione offers an acceptance speech and states his views on the world and its buildings: “I’m a materialist. A true defender of French secularism.” In that amiable tension between two different views on the world, the protagonist and his wife –a heterodox psychoanalyst– go on a trip for a few days and, as a consequence of an accidental meeting with a young couple (who are actually siblings), the man goes after the great baroque architect Francesco Borromini. The deliberate anti-naturalism in the performances, as well as the director’s mysterious frontal shot/reverse shots, work as a poetic purification system whose aim is to intensify a perceptive experience that goes against our way of being in this world. RK
Section: PanoramaD, G: Eugène Green
F: Raphäel O’Byrne
E: Valérie Loiseleux
S: Mirko Guerra, Sonia Portoghese P,
PE: Martine De Clermont-Tonnerre, Alessandro Borrelli
CP: Mact Productions, La Sarraz Pictures
Fabrizio Rongione, Christelle Prot Landman, Ludovico Succio, Arianna Nastro
La Sarraz Pictures. Antonietta Bruni
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He was born in 1947 in New York, but moved to Paris to study Literature, Languages, and Art History, and is a French citizen since 1976. He directed The Living World (2003; Bafici ‘04), Correspondences (2007), a segment of the collective film Memories (2007; Bafici ‘08) and The Portuguese Nun (2009; Bafici ‘10), among others.
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
