Orfeo

A waterway, at night. A beach, children. During the day, people strolling along the river bank. A poem in three parts, inspired by the myth of Orpheus and the filmmaker’s childhood landscapes on the Franco-Swiss border.

A waterway, at night. A beach, children. During the day, people strolling along the river bank. While we are free to let ourselves be carried away by the movements and landscapes without searching for the meaning of this triptych, the title does allow us to guess that the filmmaker has re-appropriated the myth of Orpheus within the Haute-Savoie of her childhood. The night-time crossings of the River Arve, in the beginning, could unfold in the underworld. The strange gesture of throwing a stone backwards also smacks of the myth, which is again surreptitiously foreshadowed when a black dog passes by. Filming with a 4K digital camera, Isabel Pagliai enters the image only to alter it, thus rendering the impression of pure contemplation more complex: at the edge of the water, the tracking shot using camera mapping accentuates the virtualisation of space and time; the camera’s slow zoom on the child’s face hypnotises us with its extreme definition, which increases rather than decreases as we approach it. At the end, the illusion of the single shot (actually composite) heightens the character’s isolation from the passers-by. Recomposed, this territory is more than ever one of the imagination – perhaps the quest for a fleeting beauty seen in childhood places… Eurydice lost forever. (Charlotte Garson)