Coming Alongside (2008)

In the beginning: pale gray, blurry target. It's an announcement. Of a war? No. More complex. Of a division. Between yesterday and today. In other words, as transparent as a window, between today and itself. Because in today, there is always something of yesterday that persists in the present. Olivier Derousseau is sticking to his guns. His previous films prove it: Bruit de fond, une place sur la terre and Dreyer pour mémoire, exercice documentaire (FID selections in respectively, 2001 and 2005); his titles speak volumes. It was a question of giving way completely to a restrained rage and a righteous anger; words had to be given to the silent. It was a question of keeping head up. It's still the case: continuity. But today, Derousseau is going to look for this yesterday in another great taciturn. His subject is a chatterbox in his books, a proud partner of autistic persons, a cartographer of lost steps, and a dilettante filmmaker (his utmostly moving Le Moindre Geste): Fernand Deligny. He and some others (Georges Binetruy of the Medvedkine group, Jacques Rancière) are purveyors of words and images from the past. O.D. confides those in the present to a scanning: "You see/there were so many things to say/that we began/to be silent." The first uttered phrase is a paradoxical program, a suspensive project, a request to reveal, and a double-barreled joy. That his "actors" are handicapped (as already in his Dreyer) or for a long time hired for a painting, that they pronounce scrupulously-with all the respect of those who know that understanding is a lost paradise-, and that they move so cautiously that they increase the space of their steps, changes nothing. Although it is in the center of the focus, the shore remains far, or just off to the side.