LE REFLUX

Prisoners or former prisoners… a plethora of filmed interviews record factual accounts of the long years spent cut off from society, the constraints, the violence and real or imagined escape. What marks Le Reflux out from these is not the reality of prison life experienced by Didier Lambert (who was released ten years ago after a ten-year sentence) but his astonishing determination to give himself over to introspection. Sharing a clear intimacy with the filmmaker, he seems to be actively involved with the film’s minimal and pivotal mise en scène: a deserted film set, which could initially be taken for his own interior, keeps illusion at bay and captures the act of speech. “My place isn’t very nice – I prefer somewhere neutral…”, says Didier, and indeed, the location’s “neutrality” allows his story to transport us to different places: the assize court and the prison, of course, but also the countryside where he grew up and discovered his homosexuality. Beyond the description of the court and the prison experience, Le Reflux focuses on what Didier calls (in words that must have followed a painful self-analysis) “the mental imprisonment” that precedes or even induces the physical imprisonment in jail. (Charlotte Garson)