At the heart of Jeanne Frenkel and Cosme Castro’s strange and surreal semi-animation sits a mysterious company called iNTELLIGENCE.
It’s the location of a hasty midnight appointment made by the anxious Pascal (Vincent Macaigne) after he sees their television advertisement in which they claim to create ghosts, so people can continue beyond their natural demise. Pascal has inadvertently discovered he is about to die whilst preparing the layout of tomorrow’s edition of the newspaper he works at – and stumbling upon his pre-written death notice. Now he hopes that these people may be able to extend his experiences beyond their tragically short 45 years.
This isn’t the first time that Frenkel and Castro have imagined such a strange service. Their first collaboration, on their 2017 short Adieu Bohème, was centred around a team who offered couples the chance to stage beautifully romantic goodbyes. Here, the offering from iNTELLIGENCE is far more arcane, some unfathomable procedure that transfers consciousness into a picture frame that can continue on indefinitely. The somewhat fantastical nature of this proposition is reflected in the film’s dreamlike visual style, which shoots its actors and then incorporates them into an atmospheric, deconstructed, animated world. Pascal is a designer, and the reality he inhabits seems to almost have spilt from his consciousness. The aesthetic constantly morphs between blocky graphic approximations, chiaroscuro screen prints, line-drawn backgrounds that could be slates from comic panels, paint pigment dispersing in water like lava lamps and familiar-looking collage in which the chairs in a reception area seem to have been cut and pasted from a catalogue.
The film is already presented using this visual style before Pascal makes his prophetic discovery – upon overhearing colleagues discussing his forthcoming passing – but it feels innately entwined with his subsequent spiral into despair. He chastises himself for putting things off, for allowing life to pass him by with the assumption his time was limitless, and wrangles with the nature of dying as a forgotten footnote in other people’s stories. The weirdness of the noirish world around him emphasises Pascal’s existing disconnection as well as conjuring a sense of some purgatorial unreality that he currently, and now perhaps forever will, occupy. It’s a brilliant technique for a film about the implications of death – of a fear of being gone and the incomprehensible nature of a world in which we no longer exist.
Directors, screenplay, editing: Jeanne Frenkel, Cosme Castro
Cast: Vincent Macaigne, Alma Jodorowsky, Stanley Weber
Producer: Sarah Derny
Cinematography: Hovig Hagopian
Sound: Adriano Cerone
Sound design, sound mixing: Tristan Lhomme
Music: Jacques
Production company: Envie de Tempête Productions (France)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di domani: Concorso Corti d’autore)
In French
14 minutes
