WHY THE LONG COFFEE?

In the winter of 2019, to overcome my fatherly pain, I filmed the constraint hospitalisation of my son Nathan, on the threshold of his uncertain entry into adulthood.

We could (should, even) dispense with an explanation, and simply take the friendly advice given by a first intertitle: “Listen carefully”. So, listen and look: the deep calm breathing of a son, a very big son, who is sleeping; the hand that is gently caressing his nape and belongs to the father, behind the camera. Off film, Philippe De Jonckheere explains that his son, Nathan, has a specific form of mental disability that is aggravated by his entry into adulthood: this is the when he films him, partly at the hospital where he has had to be placed temporarily, partly in the open air in a gentle landscape of lakes and forests. The film portrays their relationship but carefully refrains from recounting anything, especially as father and son are far from talkative. The peaceful fluidity of the film’s progression almost has us forget that under its appearance of a visual diary, Un café allongé… is more like a science of collage (the hospital sequences are traversed by captivating sound arrangements) that produces somewhat distraught even tearful sensations without words. In the Cévennes, where the film ends, these sensations evolve towards a peacefulness whose benefits bring relief to both son and father, as well as the viewer, under the double aegis of Fernand Deligny and a ray of sunlight that gently relays the paternal hand on Nathan’s nape.

Jérôme Momcilovic