Maniquerville Série-Collection : Trilogie en Pays de Caux

Pierre Creton
2009 - 83 min - Digital vidéo - Noir & Blanc - France

Maniquerville gerontology center, in the Pays de Caux (Normandy), accommodates elderly persons who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases. French actress Françoise Lebrun regularly comes from Paris to read out Proust to center residents. A strong bond has grown between her and center coordinator Clara Lepicard. Enough for the context, protocol or narrative framework, as you may call it. Pierre Creton obviously chooses to broaden the subject to an other dimension, leaving behind the usual sociological approach. His project is a free but strictly accurate adaptation of" Remembrance of Things Pas"t (the text is read patiently, abundantly, intensely), as if the characters from the book were raising from its pages to become before our eyes the audience of their own life stories, the spectators to their own decrepitude. Rather than a sad inventory, Maniquervillebrings about real metamorphosis. For instance, when turning an old lady’s face into a delicate white flower via a shot/ reverse shot. When drawing a parallel between the ravages of time on the residents and on the old building they used to live in, a Proustian house now empty and about to be pulled down. Or when somebody confined to a wheelchair calls up sailing memories, etc. Nothing is stable there, and Françoise Lebrun and her accomplice Clara Lepicard point it up at the end of the film, laughing during the two-voice reading of a comic extract by Blanchot, about the boundless generosity of fatigue. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)