Our review of Spectators!, the bland lesson from Professor Desplechin

Sometimes you have to be wary of the exclamation point. This punctuation mark tends to overplay emotions, to highlight joy or amazement, enthusiasm or fear. It can sound as false as « You know what ? I am happy », of Droopy, Tex Avery’s dog at the burial mine.

Spectators ! lack of drive. Arnaud Desplechin, a cinephile and cerebral filmmaker, is not, however, a sad sire. His cinema is full of affects, moods, feelings. Romantic. And Spectators !a hybrid object at the crossroads of documentary, autobiography, exercise of admiration and essay, does not lack lyricism in its fictional part. The director of How I argued… andAnd Christmas story brings his alter ego, Paul Dédalus (the young Milo Machado-Graner fromAnatomy of a fall), to recount his childhood and cinema memories. A bit like Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmanswith Roubaix in the background.

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When Paul’s grandmother (Françoise Lebrun) takes him to the cinema with his sister see Ghoststhe light beam of the projector fascinates him. Later he discovers Days of anger de Dreyer with his parents. He lies about his age to see Screams and whispers by Ingmar Bergman: a shock. There will be the college film club, Coppola’s films to overcome his shyness and talk to the girls at the end of the session, the very theoretical courses of Pascal Kané (Micha Lescot), at Censier’s university…

A commissioned film

These sequences interrupt Professor Desplechin’s cinema lesson, unless it is the other way around. The filmmaker goes back to the origins (photography, the cinema of the Lumière brothers) to unfold a less intimate than philosophical story of the seventh art. Numerous extracts illustrate the lecture: Napoleon by Abel Gance, Journey to the end of hell by Michael Cimino, Die Hard by John McTiernan, Terminator 2 by James Cameron, THE Cheyennes de John Ford (« he films in full light a people parked in the shadows »)… These works do not necessarily belong to his personal pantheon, unlike Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, « film-world » mentioned here in particular through an interview with academic Shoshana Felman.

“Spectators!” » is a commissioned film. A producer’s idea. There is nothing degrading about this. This undoubtedly explains Desplechin’s discomfort, much more free and exciting when he opens up the field of possibilities through fiction.

Declaration of love to the nostalgic and formal cinema (erotic scent of the dark room, protective cocoon and window onto the world, solitude of the spectator within a community, etc.), Spectators ! struggles to convey Desplechin’s jubilation in seeing and making films – sorry, « to inhabit the question of cinema ».

Spectators ! is a commissioned film. A producer’s idea. There is nothing degrading about this. This undoubtedly explains Desplechin’s discomfort, much more free and exciting when he opens up the field of possibilities through fiction. Good news, the filmmaker has completed filming his new feature film, A affairwith Nadia Tereszkiewicz and François Civil as piano virtuoso. This is undoubtedly the best way to bring spectators back to the theaters in large numbers.