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Come fire ( O that arde, which burns, is the Galician title), the third feature film by Franco-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, is released on French screens this Wednesday. Hailed by the jury prize of "Un certain regard" at the last Cannes Film Festival, the film tells the story of the lives of two characters, a son and his mother in an endangered rural world. A purified, quasi-documentary story transcended by the violence of nature, including human, and its mysteries.
A forest at night, trees rise to the sky in majesty, rustling leaves and squeaking trunks. And brutally, the charm breaks, the trees fall down with great noise, as uprooted by an invisible beast, one by one. The monsters appear in the spotlight: two steel titans with ruthless jaws. When appears in their headlights an old tree, in front of them, they stop. The camera caresses the trunk and the sacred music ( Nisi dominus, cum dederit of Vivaldi), rises. The violence of the world, symbolized by the beasts of iron, as paralyzed face the beauty of the old eucalyptus. These few minutes, the very beginning of the film, set the tone for Oliver Laxe's latest feature film.
Amador and Benedicta
Two characters, Amador (Amador Arias Mon) and Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez) and a scenario to the bone. Amador leaves prison after being convicted of a serious forest fire. He returns home, in winter in the pouring rain, with the backdrop of these " oldest mountains in Spain ", the Ancares massif in Galicia, cradle of the family of Oliver Laxe. A march in the shape of a way of the cross. His mother, Benedicta, greets him with all the simplicity of these peasants, saving words and useless demonstrations: "are you hungry? She asks him planted in the middle of his cabbage patch, the only spot of color in all that greyness.
Amador, with his face pricked and gnarled, is a lazy man. He settles back into his pre-prison life, drives the cows to graze, cares for his mother, lets himself be mocked by the neighbors. A character makes shadows in his relationships with humans, and light in his relationships with nature and animals, somewhere between Christ and St. Francis of Assisi. Amador, "the one who loves" and Benedicta, "the one who is blessed", an extraordinary little woman with a sharp nose and a short-sighted gaze, always wearing oversized boots or tennis shoes, reminiscent of Shakib's character in the previous feature film, Mimosas , from the director.
The story films them in their daily lives: drying the thick woolen socks on the stove, heating the slice of bread on the cast iron ... Both are - as in the previous films of the directors - non-professional actors, neighbors almost Olivier Laxe's world is familiar to him: it is his region, his mountains, his mother's village and his rain pounding the windows.
A line of force, almost documentary, that of the daily life of these two peasants in a remote hamlet of Galicia and another line, it mystical including the play of Vivaldi, which sets to music one of the so-called Psalms of Montées ( to the temple of Jerusalem) gives the "the". « I really like to talk about my work using (the image of) the cross, explains Olivier Laxe: there is a horizontal axis which is the chronology, the time that takes place, the immanence, and a vertical axis which has no (temporality) that would be transcendence and I put my cinema in the center .
On the horizontal axis, two peasants, three cows, a bitch (credited to the credits) and hives; Galicians who speak in their language, young neighbors who go back stone to stone of the old houses to welcome tourists; an original forest of hardwood gradually replaced by more profitable eucalyptus trees but which burn like matches, devastating forest fires often of criminal origin of which Galicia is customary ... On the vertical axis, Amador refuses to to defend, a very convenient scapegoat who, at each fire, is suspected by his community and whose life evokes a long way of the cross. On the same axis, these brass (trombones of the music of Georg Friedrich Haas) that sound like fate, fatum .. and echo the " scars " of Amador that evokes Oliver Laxe. Or these eucalyptus are " demons " whose roots suffocate other species, explains Amador to his mother. " If they cause pain, it is because they themselves suffer, " replied the wise Benedicta.
Too much light hides the truth of things
A suffering that echoes that of our characters. She is evoked by their relatives and we feel it sometimes arise in their difficulty to be in the world as in the scene where Amador joined the cafe, the city, the young veterinarian. Is Amador really an arsonist? The light works like a veil, according to Olivier Laxe who quotes the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (born in Spain for that matter). Too much light hides the truth of things, kills the mystery. " And often in the cinema today there is too much light ... there is no complexity, there is nothing that scrapes the soul ", regrets Oliver Laxe who points the polysemy of the term " revelar For a film (the French "develop" is more technical): re-veil, cover with a veil ... to better see? Anyway, the harsh light of the fire, whose violence echoes the toothed monsters of the beginning of the film, will not lift the veil on the character of Amador who keeps all his mystery until the end of his path cross.
The family village is now abandoned but Oliver Laxe, who after spending ten years in Morocco reinvests the house of grandparents, has a project to revive: a teaching place mixing cinema, cultural workshops, organic farming (a chestnut forest ) and rural animation.
" My goal is to get people back, " reinvigorate these mountains abandoned by their inhabitants in search of a better future - like the parents of Oliver Laxe who emigrated to Paris where he was born - using his notoriety of filmmaker crowned by three awards (for three participations!) in Cannes. Beautifully filmed mountains, in all seasons, evening mists and dazzling blades, cold lights against golden lights. Roux of the eye then the coat of the cow and finally dust of sun on the hill in a sumptuous tracking shot on Suzanne of Leonard Cohen, at the moment in the song it evokes the Christ walking on the water. In the center of the cross still ...
COME THE FIRE trailer, released on 4/09/2019 from Pyramide Distribution on Vimeo.