Le Point Aveugle

In the enclosed space of a Normandy garden, a close-up view of the plant and animal world. The gestures of the gardener-filmmaker are precise: she plants, moves plants, deseeds and protects. She also regularly treats her sore eye. This everyday space becomes a garden persistently haunted by a distant land (Chile) and a past (the dictatorship), an atmosphere of a lurking disaster insinuating its malaise into what seems to be a highly protected intimacy. Gestures of caring, for the plants and oneself, to tend wounds that remain mysterious but are seemingly shared with the other, the friend who flits by like a ghost, time enough for a double portrait. We discover nothing about the source of the desire but it will be present in the squash, gunnera, rose and artichoke flowers. Le Point Aveugle returns to the questioning of Les Jardiniers du Petit Paris. But the point of view has been narrowed down: it is her own garden, her plants and her house, filmed as a personal space that offers an opportunity to reflect on the world.Through simple but extremely precise filming choices, she pushes DV to its limits, up close to the matter of plants, to textures filmed with a rare sensuality, a rare quality of presence, of proximity. This everyday space becomes a garden persistently haunted by a distant land (Chile) and a past (the dictatorship), an atmosphere of a lurking disaster insinuating its malaise into what seems to be a highly protected intimacy. Gestures of caring, for the plants and oneself, to tend wounds that remain mysterious but seemingly shared with the other, the friend who flits by like a ghost, time enough for a double portrait. Being alone, being a twosome. An inhabited solitude, a companionship strung out between here and elsewhere. A solitary meditation searching for the blind spot of a life, in an attempt to approach this invisible dimension. This free filmmaking, which invents its own language to whisper both the intimate and the world, seems infinitely precious and infinitely innovative.

Cyril Neyrat