Aux rêveurs tous les atouts dans votre jeu

Under the Arcueil aqueduct, clouds are gliding, night is falling. Separated by static shots of this majestic piece of urban architecture a stone-throw away from the Paris city limits, the stories of four dreams divide a parallel world. Other arches: the volutes of a fiction fleetingly glimpsed by the spirit of the dreamer who makes carefree associations, thinks the unthinkable, palpitates with unreal fears. A strange phone call during the shoot of a Japanese film, children cloned at a hospital then thrown into a dustbin, a voyage on a large blue circle or an evening with friends where “you are there”: facing the camera, the dreamers speak to the film-maker, but they have not quite re-crossed the bridge. Is this the moment of remembering? When you recount a dream that you have already told, set down on paper, invented? Each dreamer seems to search through another world, to retrieve the elements of fiction before they fall into ruins. A high quality of listening enables Mehdi Benallal to capture the precision sought by the narrators, their determination to formulate their experiences, even at the risk of feeling again the shock of fright engendered by a nightmare or the nostalgia of an excessively enjoyable dream. Shuffling the cards of Robert Bresson’s film Quatre Nuits d’un rêveur, this title–which refers to a Surrealist poem–points to a redistribution: Mehdi Benallal invents a special place in cinema for the narration of dreams, far from Freudian interpretation, automatic writing or dream-inspired fiction.