Yes, it was that time of the year again. When the Institut Français Pékin quenches our thirst for European cinema on the silver screen, this time with a full retrospective of Arnaud Desplechin's feature films. The MacMahonian inspected the inaugural session: La Sentinelle.
La Sentinelle was the 1st feature film directed by Arnaud Desplechin, unclassifiable heavyweight of contemporary French cinema with a penchant for long features in which conventional dramatic situations unfold effortlessly unexpectedly.
It tells the story of Mathias Barillet (Emmanuel Salinger) son of a French military attaché in Bonn who returns to France to study forensic medicine briefly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, only to be unexplainably harassed by the intelligence services, resulting in him ending up in possession of a severed head he doesn’t seem able or willing to get rid of. It's not quite like Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949) meets Der Amerikanische Freund (Wim Wenders, 1977) but I wouldn't be surprised if these two films were conscious or subconscious sources of inspiration.
The espionage plot is merely a pretext for an ad lib portrayal of the life of young postgraduates who keep severed heads at home, an aptly obtrusive metaphor for the skeletons in everybody's closets. Most of what happens in Mathias's work, love or amateur spy dalliances is off the wall, just like in life, but funnier, and the conclusion correspondingly inconclusive, but elating.
As often happens with great film makers, it can be said all future Desplechin is already contained in La Sentinelle. If you like it, you'll probably like his subsequent output. The MacMahonian likes it.