Trois faces

In Jean Epstein’s The Three-Sided Mirror, three women in love with the same man build such dissimilar portraits of him that he becomes unrecognisable and disappears under his reflection. A recurring close-up of lighthouse lenses also pays tribute to Epstein and his optical effects. As with the author of Finis Terræ, this excessively luminous lighthouse, this over-powerful light, leads us into a blind spot. Trois Faces juxtaposes three portraits of Mediterranean cities (Barcelona, Marseilles, Genoa), explores their similarities and differences, European identity and frontier areas, from domino to card players, from GPS locating to computer-assisted architecture, from the plan sketched out on the corner of a table to the land surveyors’ readings, from panoramic views to camera-mad tourists, from the Catalan poet to the Genoese town planner. These portraits are sometimes akin to postcards. In fact, a postcard simultaneously illustrates and conceals, it enrobes and distracts the eye, it makes the visible invisible: a dying language in Barcelona, a retention centre in Marseilles impossible to fi nd, a virtual town planning project in Genoa, a pivot between northern Europe and North Africa. From one city to another, the film pinpoints the same contradiction: cities of transit and frontiers, crossroads for continents and obscure centres of disappearances. (Yann Lardeau)