While his final film “Ma vie, ma gueule” is released in theaters this Wednesday, September 18, a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française is dedicated to him. The opportunity to see and re-see his very beautiful films and to pay tribute to him once again.
The final film by Sophie Fillières (who passed away a little over a year ago), the superb My life, my faceis accompanied – pretty chaperone – by a retrospective dedicated to him by the Cinémathèque française until September 23. The opportunity to (re)see Ouch (masterpiece), Kind (masterpiece), A cat a cat, Stop or I’ll continue, Beauty and the Beautyetc., and his very first feature, which became invisible due to rights issues: Big small (1994), with Judith Godrèche.
Sophie Fillières’ films are like trains speeding through the night. But they don’t go straight, but rather in the manner of a “I’m fed up, marabout, piece of string, horse saddle”, like a system of associations of ideas. Leaps of thought that have everything to do with Lacanian psychoanalysis of which she was a fervent follower, which helped her to enter this dark and disordered forest that is life and to find a path to walk there, to try to continue to advance according to her reason.
Poetic logic
When, in the beautiful short but dense book Sophie Fillières, the right side of the wrong side (which has just been released by Playlist Society and contains a rich interview with the filmmaker, film by film), we submit to him the idea that it is always “a visual idea that introduces a character”, she replies: “Yes, who draws someone. Afterwards, it expands, from the front, from the back, from the following” – what a sense of rhythm, of scansion: a poetic logic.
Sophie Fillières was a friend: she called me “JayBee”, I called her “Sophaille” – and I only recently understood that it sounded like “Soph-aïe”. When she spoke of her children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, Sophie would say with a smile, her eyes shining: “They are the apple of my eye.” This metaphor, a priori banal, common, had a literal flavor in her mouth: she felt it deeply, it was not a cliché. Today, that her pupils, at her request, have edited her magnificent last film in her place, this image appears in all its coherence, its prophetic clairvoyance, its rainbow beauty. The circle is complete, the image has taken on meaning. Perhaps that is what it means to be a filmmaker: to manage to give meaning to the images that work on you. You work-ouch, sorry.
My life, my facee, by Sophie Fillières, with Agnès Jaoui, Angelina Woreth, Édouard Sulpice. In theaters September 17.
Sophie Fillières, the right side of the wrong sideby Charlotte Garson, Quentin Mével and Dominique Toulat, Playlist Society, 144 pages, 12 euros.
