LES CHEVEUX COURTS, RONDE, PETITE TAILLE

“It’s awful how much she reminds me of my mother, whom I lost only a year ago”: Robin Harsch shamelessly allows himself to film a woman neighbour – without consulting her – who unwittingly becomes his screen-memory. He even draws a parallel, as if it were some absurd coincidence, between the time she gets up and the time his mother died. We easily understand why the narrator-filmmaker’s sometimes comical voice-over curses his neighbour’s “kid” as he hovers around her mother on their balcony and invades the frame: this only too real teenager prevents the filmmaker from projecting himself into the image. In fact, under what seems like a mischievous inventory of obsessions (“I walk 180 metres a day between my desk and window to check if by chance she’s on her balcony”), what is being played out here is the possibility of mourning. Once across the road and armed with enough courage to ring this stranger’s doorbell, what shred of fantasised osmosis with the departed can remain? How can you leave a place that you so wanted to believe haunted, if only to savour for a little bit longer the company of a ghost? (Charlotte Garson)