Here, by Robert Zemeckis | Decomposed past

From 1907 to the present day, a house has been transformed by the various couples and families who move there.

Whether in comedy (the trilogy Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit), drama (Forrest Gump) or animation (The Polar Express), Robert Zemeckis has always known how to use technology for the benefit of storytelling and emotion. Visually dazzling, his new offering risks disorienting his most ardent admirers.

Faithful adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, based on a screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth (co-writer of Forrest Gump), Here (Iciin French version) tells the history of America in a series of scenes. From 10,000 BC to 2022, prehistoric creatures, members of the First Nations, soldiers, slaves, historical figures, then various couples and families who came to settle in a house built in 1907 on the same site will parade captured by a fixed camera.

Over the periods, which follow one another according to a montage of subliminal fluidity, the aspiring painter Richard (Tom Hanks) and the aspiring lawyer Margaret (Robin Wright), who live with the parents of the former, Al (Paul Bettany), a veteran of the Second World War, and Rose (Kelly Reilly), a housewife, will become the main characters in the hypnotic choral story.

A couple of Indigenous people, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, a bourgeois couple, an inventor and his wife, as well as an Afro-descendant couple and their Mexican housekeeper will pass by in a rush of wind. By briefly adding to their story, Zemeckis and Roth touch on the socio-economic movement, advances in science, immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Like the graphic novel, windows into other eras are integrated into each painting. In this way, the various stories echo each other, illustrating that despite the evolution of morals and the passage of time, the members of the great human family experience essentially the same things. In doing so, Here sometimes takes on the appearance of a quilt with faded colors.

If the execution commands admiration, the ambitious, even capricious, narrative process prevents the spectator from really becoming attached to the different protagonists and even from being interested in the multiple stories which furtively intertwine in that of the couple formed by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.

Reunited 30 years later Forrest Gumpthe two actors appear, thanks to digital makeup, in turn in their early youth and in their old age. If the effect is striking in a wide shot, which nevertheless creates an emotional distance, when the actors move into the foreground, the magic no longer works. In the end, Here appears closer to a museum audiovisual installation than to a cinematographic object.

In the room