With his latest film halfway between a filmed essay and a self-portrait, Arnaud Desplechin intends to retrace his love affair with the art he has been practicing for three decades, while exploring more broadly, through a series of vignettes heterogeneous, which according to him is the basis of this good old magic of cinema. Between fictional sequences, documentary shots, voice-over narration and interviews, Spectators! looks like a curious hybrid object.
But on closer inspection, it is above all on the surface: whether the camera ventures into a museum or a cinema, whether it films a historian or an actor soliloquizing on the seventh art, this multitude is mainly of a form of lecture, in which Desplechin would don the costume of the teacher repeating clichés with the help of dates and sepia portraits. The kaleidoscope quickly borders on the mass of generalities, to the point of reproducing, during face-to-face interviews with ordinary people, the device of a sidewalk microphone – the prototype of a machine for diluting individuality into a collection of places common.
Screen barrier
It is when Desplechin films conversely as close as possible to his own story that the film stands out. Paul Dédalus, recurring character in his filmography played here by four different actors
World
