“Camille redoubles”, on Arte: a joyful and moving return in time

ARTE – WEDNESDAY 21 DECEMBER AT 8:55 P.M. – FILM

Who has never let themselves be charmed by the spells of time travel? Noémie Lvovsky makes, with Camille repeats, a tight tribute to Coppola’s beautiful film Peggy Sue got married (1986, story of a woman reliving her youth without having rejuvenated).

Either Camille (Noémie Lvovsky), a mother in her forties in the last degree of perdition. A household that explodes in full flight, a moderately comforting job, a shaky psychic stability. We do not see what could, right now, like that, save him the day.

Now, look how things are done, it just happens to be New Year’s Eve. And that an old friend invites Camille to a costume party where all the high school alumni will gather. She goes straight there. After a short detour to the jeweller, just to get your clock back on time and saw off your wedding ring. The man runs. He looks like Jean-Pierre Léaud, who looks more and more like Antonin Artaud, the most savage and shamanic of French poets.

At the stroke of midnight, as she throws her wedding ring out the window, Camille passes out and wakes up one morning in 1985. This space-time shock, worthy of a fairy tale, reveals her in a bed of hospital after a night of drinking. Camille, while remaining historically, physically and mentally the forties we know, has at the same time become the punkette of her teenage years.

Familiar strangeness

This effect of distancing which sees an adult character playing the teenager that he was does not serve to feed the humor of the situation, although the film is not devoid of it. Rather, it is a pretext for a sort of familiar strangeness, a daydream, the source of a meditation full of melancholy. Its main motive can be summed up as follows: assuming that we had the possibility of returning to the past, could we modify our future?

Will Camille avoid being seduced by her future husband Eric (Samir Guesmi), whom she knows will make her unhappy? Will she prevent her mother, at the day and time she knows only too well, from dropping dead in her kitchen? Will she be able to repair the harm she has done, the indifference, the pain she has felt?

All the beauty of this film, which is the opposite of an uchronia, consists in answering these questions in the negative, while suggesting that something of this order is still happening before our eyes. The infinitely moving scene where Camille tells her mother that she loves her, a few moments before the dreaded moment of her death, demands to be considered as a founding image of reason and of the very existence of the film.

Noémie Lvovsky resonates in French auteur cinema with a little music that belongs only to her. A joyful harmony whose quack would be the key.