Thanks for Coming

It’s easy to describe Thanks for Coming as Alain Cavalier’s final testimony to film. There’s the title, the melancholic voiceovers about times past, the final shots of him wrapping his camera up with paper and then bidding farewell to the viewer through his reflection on a TV screen. However, there’s a lot of more to the documentary than what meets the eye. As we follow Cavalier through the last 15 years of his life, we also get a sidelong glimpse of the evolution of French cinema (from 35mm to digital) and French society (through the director’s visits to his neighbourhood shops and his travels across his home country).

Bowing in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, the documentary will definitely appeal to global cinephiles like his 2004 piece Le Filmeur did. Even those who don’t know his work can enjoy the documentary, viewing it as the video diary of a tipsy, funny uncle.

The film begins in 2011, when Cavalier is shooting the low-budget Pater – a film in which he shared acting duties and camerawork with his regular collaborator, the actor Vincent Lindon. We then see him filming his deluxe hotel room in Cannes, where the film was selected for competition. Black comedy ensues when he and his life partner, the editor Françoise Widhoff, get off a train heading towards Cannes to return to Paris after being informed they didn’t win anything.

Boasting a very barbed sense of humour that makes her the yang to Cavalier’s yin, Widhoff is just as much a star of the documentary as the director himself. We see her mocking Cavalier for filming footage “which has tons of atmosphere”; we see her wrapping up their deceased cat in a red blanket, her last words to her pet completely heartbreaking. It’s only the first of many deaths in the documentary, as Cavalier marks the passing of friends such as the French writer Emmanuèle Bernheim, the subject of his 2019 doc Living and Knowing You’re Alive, and the death of his own brother.

As Thanks for Coming ushers us through Cavalier’s previous decade, we witness how this genuinely independent filmmaker develops his ideas and tries to follow them through. Somewhere in the documentary, Cavalier describes the objective of his late-stage filmmaking as the search for the “first images of my childhood”. Interestingly, there aren’t any in Thanks for Coming; rather, Cavalier offers footage which can allow us to speculate on his inner being. A close-up of his hands breaking bread and his offscreen voice talking about Jesus and the apostles, for example, could be interpreted as his belief in solidarity among men. His ramshackle enactment of war using a tiny toy robot and toothpicks is juxtaposed with his comments about the Odyssey, probably alluding to his craving for journeys.

Such philosophical meanderings are lined up side by side with images of more banal things, such as the running joke of Cavalier mumbling in voiceover about the quality of the hotel rooms he has to stay in as he travels across France for screenings and masterclasses. At the end of the documentary, Cavalier says he won’t be travelling for these appointments anymore. He didn’t attend the premiere of the film at Cannes – but, well, never say never with such a lively character.

Director, screenplay, cinematography: Alain Cavalier
Producers: Michel Seydoux
Editing: Emmanuel Manzano
Sound: Steve Raccah
Production companies: Camera One
World sales: Camera One
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In French
82 minutes