Un, Parfois Deux

This is a country home where one and sometimes two films are made. The shot, framing and lighting set-ups, from rehearsals to shooting, from problems to their solutions. Everything that remains outside the camera’s eye at the moment of shooting: and a whole team focused on what exists within this field of view. For Laurent Achard – perhaps more than others to judge from his own films including his features More Than Yesterday (1998), Demented (2007), Last Screening (2011) – fiction is a matter of offscreen, a force that gives each shot a precise albeit indefinable meaning. It is often said (in rather clichéd terms) that the offscreen dimension “works” the film. Here, the crew works on a film that remains offscreen, which we reconstitute little by little (in snippets) and which, in turn, “works” the incidental story of these people making a film. Yet, the story of the shoot is not behind the film being made, or in front of it; but always on the side… Laurent Achard’s long wide-angle shots are searching for what happens on the side-lines: how the set crew make coffee in the kitchen while filming is in progress in the other room (without a sound), or how the actors manage to be just two in the frame in a crowded room. There is a very fine scene where Catherine Deneuve appears and disappears among the crew members, in total contradiction to the straight-on shot they are recording.

Luc Chessel (Libération, 2 December 2016)