SAUF ICI, PEUT-ÊTRE

Everything starts with objects. Matthieu Chatellier, who from behind the camera talks with the members of an Emmaus community in the Caen region, recognises the plates and furniture that lulled his childhood. But he barely has time to sink into nostalgia: all the men he films are active, over-active even, sorting and checking clothes according to strict criteria, labelling each piece of furniture in a warehouse filled to the brim, constantly energised by their ability to turn amorphous shapes into objects, scrap into gold. After the obvious satisfaction of seeing a system improve broken lives, comes a singular emotion that radiates from each portrait. The limited size of the rooms and the taste for accumulation acquired by several of these castaways of life (a hackneyed metaphor that is stripped bare here) transform their interiors into intensely dense empires of signs. The tiniest knick-knack hides a far-off origin, an unspoken “bad memory”, an inviolable secret. With the same concentration deployed by one of the men photographing a tiny pink flower, the filmmaker and his editor recreate the present of lives tarnished by perpetual journeying. Through its listening, framing and light, the film replaces the biblical reference to the companionship on the road to Emmaus with, Ulyssian symbolism.

Charlotte Garson