Top prizewinner at Locarno 2012, so it’s the closer of LNKarno 2017, and an ass-kicking low-key ghost movie, reminiscent of Personal Shopper down to the direct Victor Hugo references.
Dora (Virginie Legeay of Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels, also his assistant director) appears beaten and bloodied at the front door of Michel (played by the late-Depardieu-looking director himself), he invites her to move in, then strange things start to happen: objects moving on their own, glimpses of robed figures in the hall, and sounds from the closet like a wolf moving a bureau.
I liked the movie’s style, especially once the spirits appeared with charmingly simple ghost-costumes. The whole thing appears to have been shot on the cheap, with medium-res video and occasional mic problems – unless the DVD was just poorly produced. Set mostly in Michel’s apartment (the director’s own, per Cinema Scope), which is wall-to-wall media – books and albums and every classic-cinema DVD boxed set.
Dora tests Michel, suspicious of his intentions. For his part, he seems honestly enthused to have somebody to pay attention to, after living alone for three decades, acting like she’s a long-lost daughter home for a visit. She moves in and helps with his book “about the importance of delusion in our lives”. Then he proposes they marry, so she can inherit his apartment tax-free (there’s a Freud paperback in the movie’s second shot). In the end, the book is finished and he’s killed by a thief – I think with the inheritance issue unresolved.
Boris Nelepo, in an essential article:
So what can a filmmaker achieve with the absolute minimum at his disposal: a small camera (La fille is Brisseau’s first digitally shot film), a minimal space, and an amateur actress in the title role? As with the even more restricted Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker can proudly make a real movie, as if there were no production limitations at all. In La fille du nulle part, Brisseau has created a film of heavenly beauty, warmth, and tenderness, revealing and revelling in the Mélièsian essence of cinema. As with Philippe Garrel in La frontière de l’aube and Manoel de Oliveira in The Strange Case of Angelica, Brisseau understands … that it is the most seemingly naïve, handcrafted effects that best reflect the innate illusionism of film. Indeed, for Brisseau film is itself a magical medium, a portal into a different world … Frequently drawing his protagonists from the world of science … Brisseau continually posits the existence of an intangible world, one invisible to their rationalist eyes until a sudden inspiration, granted by art, mystical epiphany, or physical ecstasy, reveals to them the essential incomprehensibility of the outside world and the limitations of man’s understanding thereof.
