À travers la forêt

65 minutes of pure perfection in 10 shots. An ode to the divine beauty and charm of Camille Berthomier who acts sensually and tragically throughout this reverie. Nothing is left apart here and Civeyrac creates a unique atmosphere with music (John Cage - songs sung by the lead actress), light (the bodies exposed to darkness and light at different), sound and choreography [(Civeyrac's sensibility to movement and harmony of bodies and movement of the camera being linked to the fact he has lived with a choreographer for 5 years) that gets its roots in the best of Truffaut (the literary process of the film, the fascination with women and love), Bresson (the purity of each shot, each emotion), Godard (Camille Berthomier being his muse, his Anna Karina). The best film shown at the New York Film Festival 2005 and certainly one of the very best films of 2005.

There is something quite uncanny about À travers la forêt. If you take a look at Camille Berthomier in her role in this movie as protagonist Armelle, and compare her to Juliette Gréco as Aglaonice (leader of the Bacchantes) in Jean Cocteau's Orphée you can see a quite striking resemblance in terms of looks, facial expression and eventually hairstyle. Also of interest is that both movies are neoclassical, and contain supernatural mirror tricks.

Armelle is one of three sisters (Bérénice and Roxane are the others), who bring to mind references such as the witch sisters of Macbeth, or the three Graces, Fates, or Gorgons of classical mythology. The Graces are hinted at the most with the classical triangular arrangement employed when the sisters visit a bar. Although both Bérénice and Roxane have men, we never see them, and the only time the other two sisters are on screen they complete a circle with Armelle, that no-one else enters. It's all the more potent then that Armelle's obsession with her dead boyfriend is rupturing the extreme valency of this unit.

The feel of the movie is what's important here, the movie pays absolutely no lip service to zeitgeist, minimalist sets with few extras, a movie that stays indoors until the climax, and every scene is shot continuously, to create an organic feeling. Someone once said that every edit is like an abrupt awakening from a dream, here Civeyrac keeps the movie as dream-like as possible.

A question that arises for me from watching the movie is the nature of a woman's love, which seems here to relate very much to the feeding of vanity and egotism by flattery, where a man's role is simply to be the "mirror mirror on the wall". As Sophie Marceau intoned in Possession, "The only thing women have in common, is menstruation", but I have certainly met one or two women who fall into the Armelle mould.

À travers la forêt is very loosely based on neoclassicist Jean Racine's 1677 play Phèdre, where a woman is also driven mad by love, and an innocent male character (called Hippolyte in play and film) is used by the female protagonist. The unusually named sisters of Armelle are also sourced from Racine (Roxane from the play Bazajet, and Bérénice eponymously).

It's a short film (just over an hour) but manages to build up a ferocity of madness by the end that is quite overwhelming. I also am an absolute sucker for films that use John Cage music, in this case "Two⁴" for Violin and Sho (played by the great Irvine Arditti, and Mayumi Miyata), but most fittingly Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question".

In this fascinating and romantic story about love and death, a young woman seeks the help of a medium to get her dead lover out of her thoughts, without positive results. However, her visit has an unexpected effect, when she meets a boy who is the spitting image of her deceased boyfriend, giving the story of her obsession a circular turn. This is the second film by Jean-Paul Civeyrac that I have seen... What a beautiful cinema his is. So sensual and magical, so erotic and lyrical and ghostly... Also, economical in every way. Just one hour and it says as much or more than many films that last hours and hours... Highly recommended.

Jean-Paul Civeyrac: Through the Forest/À travers la forêt (France 2005) 65 minutes. No US distributor. Shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2 2005.

Shot in wide aspect ratio with pale amber filters, Civeyrac's new film is a myth or elegant fable whose subjects are three pretty girls and a pretty boy. The main character is Armelle (Camille Berthomier), chattering naked on a bed in the first image of the film (in which there are just ten shots, set off by chapter headings), where we glimpse only the well-formed naked butt of her lover Reynaud (Aurélien Wiik). Suddenly the room darkens, a storm rumbles, and Armelle can't understand why. In the next shot Reynaud has died in an accident and Armelle's two other dark-haired sisters, Roxanne (Margane Hainaux) and Bérénice (Alice Dubuisson) are trying to talk Armelle into accepting her lover's death. One accompanies her to see a medium, whereupon a Reynaud lookalike, Hippolyte (also Aurélien Wiik) appears. Armelle next has awoken from a coma, apparently brought on by taking pills, and now she may have acquired special powers -- including the ability to draw Hippolyte away from another woman to kiss her instead. In the last shot, Armelle, alone again, goes to Reynaud, whom she hears calling her from inside a forest.

This new film by Civeyrac is beautiful, elegant, and classically French, evoking Cocteau more than Rohmer. But treating its heavy theme of suffering and loss in a manner that's equivocal, even frivolous, and being after all only sixty-five minutes long, this latest work by the little-known director, who teaches in a prestigious French film school, feels tantalizing and incomplete.