QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE

This enchanting and enigmatic film takes up “the” favourite documentary subject: manual work, the satisfaction or alienation of repeated gestures and man’s interaction with the machine. Yet, there is nothing less object-oriented than Denis Côté’s films. In the first part of Joy of Man’s Desiring, majestic shots, splendidly framed and lit, alternate the whole and details, before the second part introduces us to the actors. Côté builds up a speed that outpaces that of the workers and the explicit theatricality of written dialogue breaks with the usual silence associated with industrial work. Confusing our senses and our search for sense, the film is also traversed by different fictional genres: the almost sci-fi sound on the credits, swathes of fiction to depict the characters, remarks worthy of a griot uttered during the break, a shadow of Metropolis, a shiver of horror when a worker prays in front of his machine that he lose a finger, a hand … In these wholly inhabited shots, the sacred dimension of Bach’s chorale encounters the abstract but image-laden writing of Giono’s Joy of Man’s Desiring to weave a form so rare nowadays that it has become incongruous: the allegory. (Charlotte Garson)