THE “WORLD” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Thierry de Peretti, a man of the theatre who moved to cinema, born in Ajaccio in 1970, returns to the Corsican saga which occupied his first two feature films, The Apaches (2013) et A violent life (2017), after a detour through the atmospheric thriller imbued with political fiction that was Investigation into a state scandal (2022). Inspired by the eponymous novel by his “compatriot” Jérôme Ferrari, A son image (Actes Sud, 2018), which took part in the Quinzaine des Cinémas in Cannes in May, looks back at the period of the 1980s and 1990s already described in A violent lifeconcerning the drift of the Corsican independence movements towards armed struggle, internal rivalries, vendettas galore and banditry. To this historical sequence, A son image places a female counterpoint, focusing on the journey of a young activist’s companion, caught up in love at the heart of the turmoil.
The film starts off very strongly, in this case at the end, with the heroine’s accidental death in a car accident as a highlight, a terrible road accident from which everything else will be told, not without a poignant sense of waste from the outset. In the early 1980s, Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo) was groping her way out of adolescence, intrigued by family photos, learning to handle a film camera, and soon finding a job as a photographer in Corsica-Matin.
A step aside
At the same time, she falls in love with a certain Pascal (Louis Starace), haughty bearing and long wavy hair, a nationalist activist around whom gravitates a whole group of friends of the same age, driven by the cause. This is the period of the Bastelica-Fesch affair (hostage-taking of three spies), the double homicide of June 6, 1984 in the prison of Ajaccio and other commando operations. Each time, Pascal, implicated, falls and spends successive stays in prison, while Antonia suffers her intermittences, reduced in spite of herself to her role of “wife of”, brought back to the community of patient wives. A role that she will end up energetically refusing, as well as the distressing narrowness of her subjects for the regional press, leaving on a whim for a war report on another front, in ex-Yugoslavia.
By drawing this portrait over a period of twenty years, Thierry de Peretti finds a way of not telling recent Corsican history too directly, with all the fictional artifices that this would imply. A son image rather describes a step aside, allowing this sequence of armed struggle to be perceived only through its repercussions on the intimate life of its heroine. This is the first beauty of the film: to place itself, not at the heart of the events, but just next to them, in this existential sphere which receives the echo while keeping one foot in everyday life.
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