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CANNES 2007 Directors’ Fortnight / FR

Avant que j'oublie: A tale of desire

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Presented today in the Directors' Fortnight, Avant que j'oublie [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
is the third film by actor-scriptwriter-director and a key figure in French auteur cinema Jacques Nolot. It is also Nolot’s third time at Cannes after L'Arrière-Pays (1997 Directors’ Fortnight) and Glowing Eyes [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
(2002 Un Certain Regard).

His third feature is just like the third stage of life, told at a slow pace, and is the continuation of the adventures of the autobiographical character of Pierre, whom Nolot plays himself.

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Avant que j'oublie, an auto-fiction of sorts, meets the character, not in his childhood or his Parisian life like in the two previous films, but this time at death’s door.

The film opens on a white screen, where out of nowhere a black dot appears. It then gradually grows bigger before finally taking over to let the black film screen emerge. At the end of the film, Pierre, who, throughout the whole film shied away from doing certain things, finally dares to shave off his moustache and disguise himself as a woman.

One evening coming out of a cinema, he meets a young lover. From the start of the film to this point, Avant que j'oublie follows the intimate life of our main protagonist, his fears and his loves.

With a preference for a simple and traditional style, dominated by frontal shots, the film continues with drawn-out scenes and lengthy dialogues that accompany Pierre in his loneliness and harmless gestures that betray his fears, in his job as a writer, his difficulties in being creative and in his encounters with friends who bring up the past.

Dandy, refined and tired, he talks about money: how much he pays his gigolos, the price of a session with his therapist and the inheritance that he got from his ex-lover. A recurrent theme, money, like desire, memories and words, circulates between characters in dialogue that is often close to being monologues. Nostalgic in parts, ridiculous situations and cutting responses also lend to the film’s humour, distance and reserve. Former CNC director David Kessler as the psychoanalyst is also admirable.

Whether he means to be derisive or not, Nolot depicts with tenderness and elegance the despair of age and refined and laconic grief. An elegy to a milieu (intellectual, homosexual Paris) and a film on memories and growing old, desire and love, Avant que j'oublie is, first and foremost, a film on the desire to love and create, both at odds with death.

Written, starring and directed by Nolot, the €1.13m Elia Films production was filmed in under a month and financed almost entirely from CNC advances on receipts.

Currently without an international sales agent, the film will be released in France through ID Distribution this autumn.

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(Translated from French)

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