Soleil sombre

Paulette, a middle-aged woman from Avignon, lives alone and is following a drug substitution treatment. One day, she receives a letter from Djilali, who is detained in the penitentiary centre. He still loves her and asks her to wait for him.

In Avignon, Paulette, a middle-aged woman lives alone and is undergoing drug substitution treatment. “My darling Chouquette, remember your promise: that you won’t let yourself go to ruin…” Djilali, her lover and fellow drug addict, is serving time in prison. He asks her to wait for him. Much more than an observer, Marie Moreau places herself as close as possible to the woman who is questioning herself and leading a still bumpy, not to say chaotic, life. The filmmaker, who had filmed Djilali in her previous film, converses amicably with Paulette, who often seeks her advice. Together, the women watch fragments – with or by Djilali – of the couple’s life in a caravan – which his sweetheart revisits nostalgically. When Djilali remarked: “I’m a filmmaker, I film what I want!”, he was jokingly expressing the recipe for the freedom that a creative act, even a tiny one, gives an author. Yet, absence and waiting brings the grey areas of this romance to the surface, as shown by Paulette’s night-time call for help filmed by Marie. The filmmaker has no hesitation in referring to this moment, holding out to Paulette the mirror of her contradictions and the times she loses her footing, visibly under the influence. The tenor of this relationship – a seemingly effortless balance between caring and lucidity – makes the stock-in-trade “right distance” of the documentary a decidedly theoretical affair, which the film’s comical and disturbing finale replays in an optical suspense. (Charlotte Garson)