Les photos d'Alix (Jean Eustache, 1982)

 

In Jean Eustache’s captivating Les photos d’Alix, the real-life photographer Alix Clio-Roubard calmly talks the director’s son Boris through a series of her photographs, in some cases emphasizing technical matters, in others the nature of the underlying memory or personal connection, the film allowing both us and Boris time to absorb her explanation before moving on to the next; it gradually dawns on you that what she’s saying no longer bears any relationship to the picture she’s addressing, that she’s pointing out people and objects and effects that plainly aren’t there. The film is in a certain sense an extended joke, and as such works best first-time round: the viewer starts to register the difficulty of relating her words to the image before us, but in the absence of any signal to the contrary likely attributes the shortfall to his or her own deficiencies, perhaps a lack of concentration or an insufficiently refined aesthetic sensibility. Even as the film’s scheme becomes clear, it’s tempting to search for a rational explanation, that sound and image have somehow become decoupled: Alix’s explanations remain so calmly persuasive that one may see the photos she’s describing as clearly as the ones before our eyes, if not more so. The concept wouldn’t work so well if Alix’s photos weren’t indeed so beguiling, so worthy of being contemplated and curated (even if not in the actual way that she does it); Boris’s regular-guy-in-an-ugly-sweater vibe providing an ideally unprepossessing counterpart. But the film feels retrospectively seeped in tragedy: the director committed suicide not long after its completion (and before its 1982 Cesar win for best short film), and Clio-Roubaud died of a pulmonary embolism in 1983, at the age of just 31, a fact that makes the film seem even more ephemeral and elusive and seeped in transient illusion.