Une Ombre au tableau

Everything is coming apart. In his powdered wig, the ancestor, straight-set in his picture frame, watches with dismay his lineage crumble two centuries later. It is simple: they have even forgotten his name. The wedding gifts sold off, the sale of the family chateau to expensive to keep up, the depression of the mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, it is the crumbling of a world-in this case his own-that Amaury Brumauld films for his son, a world of traditions, in principle made to last and which, shot after shot, fritters away, collapses like a frail house of cards, as if all was only an illusion. This dislocation of a world is reversed by the simple fact that it is filmed, in the same way that a ruin preserves intact the memory of a monument and its past splendours. (Yann Lardeau)