À bas bruit
Judith Abitbol
2012 - 103 min - HDCam - Couleur - France

"We will see Léonore, who might be a filmmaker, and Agathe, a Butcher’s assistant, consumed day and night with a creative business, both wearying and utterly unsettling. In a large room with white walls: one or two chairs, a desk and an actress, a script in her hands. Despite the lack of means, a colossal space will unfold from this point. With words spoken, whispered and told again, a strange, dreamlike story will develop, the extent of which will be revealed gradually. The body and voice that can be seen and heard belong to Nathalie Richard, spectacular in her command of trials and errors. As the only person on stage, she plays every character, women, men and ox. For the theme here is body – or meat, in other words. Still raw, even scraped. Suffering and pain loom beneath the purity of the set, the delicacy of slow motion, the fair hair of Nathalie Richard, before suddenly moving to a slaughterhouse. Through seemingly showing the strings, drafts, building diagram and other rehearsals of her story Judith Abitbol alludes to the unremitting efforts produced by the mind to fill in the emptiness and absence Agathe and Léonore have set to tackle – together, although each in her own way – regardless of the inevitable putrefaction of the flesh. Surprising, extreme and harsh, just like ‘enlarged children’s games’, her work restores surrealism’s liberating power. With a somewhat sweetness to it." (Céline Guénot, FID 2012)