Pain is Good: MES SEANCES DE LUTTE by Jacques Doillon

 

A black screen and a piece of Debussy :

This is how "Mes Seances De Lutte" by Jacques Doillon starts.

It is like a presentiment.

Or even better, a different manner of advising us that this story is not just about love and violence between two adults.  

 

The childhood.

The slow, inexorable, unavoidable building of a fortress around itself, as the years pass by, as the world amplifies, as some people desappear for letting some new ones fill in their place, and some other people just deasappear and leave a huge void.

A void that will somehow be filled.

 

 

And it does not matter having becomed adults.

Because you try to fill it up by instinct, like a child.

But contrary to a child, you are not innocent anymore. You have already learnt to be merciless, even evil if necessary.

It is important to defend yourself. It is important not to suffer again.

You don’t want to remember, but something obliges you to.

It is a subtle pain that could become every day even more unbearable.

Objects are impregnated with memories and they observe you from their soulless state, emphasizing the outline of your forgiveness.

That piano, for instance.

The piano that a father always wanted to see you playing at and that you always saw as an ennemy…

There is that father that dies… a certain presence that vanishes and whos disappearance ignites feelings of guilt and desillusion that had remained scelled, buried under denial.

The force that the director convies to that piano is extraordinary. But it is still a pretext to speak about people, about us.

A woman and a man that meet again after having attentively avoided eachother.

 The woman who, having lost her father, goes looking for that man on a hill where he is taking care of a friend.

And just by chance, the first time we see this man in the film, he is building a wall.

If her anaesthesia is brutally interrupted by Death, the man’s lingering state will suddenly be interrupted by the vision of a woman that suddenly returns to his life.

 "Why are you here? Why are you back?" he asks.

And it is the beginning of a storm.

A daily encounter.

The battles, so do they decide to call them.

Each of them with its own fortress around, they decide to battle even harder at each encounter until they can break through their respective walls.

For ultimateley finding beyond those bareers “just” two people that need to be loved and who are affraid to do it because they believe they do not know how to do it, they don’t deserve it, or that they are irremediably wrong.

 Every day there is a battle.

Doillon has shot this low budget film during two summer months, apparently without a screenplay, but in reality extremely precise.  Shaped on an exact measure.

One dialogue too much, one exceeding or lesser gesture, and the ridiculous would enter by the main door, compromising everything.

But this is not happening.

Characters and spectators begin to believe it, to enter the games and demands of this film. And the director seems happy to make visible some uncertainty.

Because improvisation is the mean and the message of this film.

How to use it, how to deny it, how to bring it under the light of truth and then violently throw it into fiction.

This is what Doillon seems to question, with this empiric experiment, in a somehow Seventies’ fashion.

A film about the contradiction of an absolutely cerebral dialogue and a totally physical action, primordial and immediate.

 A film that could be therapeutical, or the total opposite.

So days pass, and violence and libido start to merge.
Until they become one same thing.

Everyday, they try to fill up each other’s void…
And more time passes, and less they care about hurting each other.
On the contrary, pain is even welcomed.

 Every battle is a sort of couple exorcism, where one is the exorcist of the other.

Not alone anymore, they plounge in a gloomy, confused waiting.

 Finally together.

 And we should prepare to wait...

 

GD