La Chambre bleue

“Dying comes quickly. Disappearing takes much longer. This thought hit me when I instinctively wanted to tell my father that my wife was pregnant, in 2010. And my father had already been dead for several years…” Since this death in 2002, Paul Costes has often heard the now commonplace admonition that it is time to move on from grieving. Mixing Super-8 home movies and recent one-on-ones with members of his family—who are also invited to a meal to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his father’s death—the filmmaker has produced a digressive comedy that is also a letter to the departed. On the way, he realises that the living are not so keen to get together, or so quick to remember. “We don’t really sense who he was any more… When someone’s dead, they become fixed”, says the albeit inconsolable mother. Have the grandfather’s home movies—two decades of birthdays captured on film—fulfilled their ritual duty of immortalisation or, on the contrary, documented the haemorrhaging of time? A journey into the mindset and territory of the Gascon gentry, The Blue Room confronts the secrets of the women in the family with the men’s more biased relationship to memory, what the brothers leave unsaid with the words of France’s last World War I soldiers read yet again by the grandfather, who served many years as mayor. Edit, comment, replay: all ways of awakening a memory that was late in answering the roll call. (Charlotte Garson)