Filmlovers! (Spectateurs!), which world-premiered May 22 at Cannes, sees director Arnaud Desplechin celebrating cinemas and their “manifold magic.” Weaving drama, interviews and archival footage and film clips, the core of the film sees the filmmaker walk in the footsteps of his alter ego protagonist Paul Dédalus – played by a variety of actors at all ages – as if in a filmmaker’s coming-of-age story. As Desplechin says: “Memories, fiction, discoveries come together in an irrepressible torrent of pictures.”
This interpretation of film memory makes Paul/Arnaud’s interaction with cinema a very personal one – Paul’s grandmother takes him and his sister to the cinema for the first time as children. Desplechin says in his notes: ”My parents didn’t have television, but I watched films at my grandmothers’ house. So, there was nothing exceptional for me about merely watching a film, but sitting in a cinema was something new!”
He runs the film club at his school and shows Czech director Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film Daisies to schoolmates; lies about his age (14) to go and see Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, and meets girls at a screening who use him as a ruse to jump the cinema queue to see Peggy Sue Got Married.
In a charming sequence, as the children sit in wonder at their first film at a cinema, actress Françoise Lebrun (as the grandmother) improvises around the mystery of the projection booth and the beam of cinematic light. For young Paul, the other worldliness of the projector is as fascinating as the screen. Similarly, sister Delphine is an equally innocent spectator and is scared and shocked by seeing Andre Hunebelle’s 1964 film Fantômas.
Also interweaving through the film – and acting as a narrator – is Mathieu Amalric as ‘the filmmaker,’ who describes the power of early cinema as time and movement were photographed, and eventually projected onto the screen. “America invented the first films,” he says. “France found cinema.”
Desplechin was approached by producers Charles Gillibert and Romain Blondeau and asked if he would like to make a documentary about ‘film projection.’ In his film notes he says: “I told them I didn’t know how to make a documentary, but that I might think about a hybrid form. I put a few ideas down on paper, and little by little the film began to take shape. It was easy to write because I kept coming back to my own thoughts about cinema that were in my head for over twenty years, so the writing poured out of me.”
“The film is both a commission from Charles and Romain and an infinitely personal essay,” he adds. “What started out as a straightforward documentary project became a vast and multi-layered film.”
Rather charmingly, the film celebrates its multiple layers by adding in a sequence where he interviews a selection of people who recall their first film, and the film that first frightened them. We see philosopher Sandra Laugier discussing cinema with three young film enthusiasts. Elsewhere, Desplechin recalls his love for the work of the late actress Misty Upham, and films himself interviewing both critic/curator/programmer Kent Jones in New York and writer Shoshana Felman in Israel, where he spends time discussing the importance (to him and the world) of Claude Lanzmann’s epic nine-and-a-half hour documentary Shoah.
Film extracts range from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Abel Gance’s Napleon and Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, through to King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club and John Woo’s Broken Arrow, but the film is less about making a series of individual cases for magnificent cinema (except perhaps in the case of Shoah) and more about celebrating the emotional and intellectual experience that being in a cinema can offer. And it’s all rounded off with a spirited rendition of Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Arms.
Desplechin further notes: “At the end of the film, we meet Paul Dedalus again, played by Salif Cissé; he confesses to his own filmmaking aspirations – but will he ever make films? Regardless, he is a spectator, and will never stop being a spectator, and that’s enough for me!”
France, 2024, 88mins
Dir/scr: Arnaud Desplechin
Production: CG Cinema, Scala Films, Arte Cinema France, Hill Valley Entertainment
International sales: Les Films du Losange
Producer: Charles Gillibert, Romain Blondeau
Cinematography: Noé BachEditor: Laurence Briaud
Music: Grégoire Hetzel
With: Louis Birman, Dominique Paini, Clement Hervieu-Leger, Francoise Lebrun, Salif Cissé, Sandra Lauguer, Kent Jones, Shoshana Felman, Mathieu Amalric
