71st Berlinale – ‘Hygiène sociale’, putting social relationships to the test

The part that premiered final 12 months beneath the identify Encounters continues to provide us explicit samples of unbiased movie: ‘Hygiène sociale‘received the ex aequo award in the class for the course of Denis Côté. The Quebecois director is understood for exploring the themes of loneliness, worry and alienation of the particular person, in addition to questioning the language of cinema in his documentary and fictional works.

Though the challenge was born in 2015 throughout a trip in Sarajevo, says the director, it was throughout the pandemic that he determined to shoot it, and the incontrovertible fact that it seems in 2021 frames it in these instances which have modified a lot the manner in that we relate to the world.

Denis Côté recovers and incorporates into his work a few of these modifications, that are already a part of modernity, with irony and exaggeration, and turns them into a really explicit language. With a majority of lengthy and stuck pictures, the movie is theatrical even in the performances, giving it its personal type that the director likes to think about as a bridge to the cinematographic language. Shot on a low finances, he emphasizes that it’s exactly on this financial constraint the place he finds biggest pleasure in experimenting with type and cinematographic narration: “You’ve to be easy, authentic and sacrifice a little bit of ambition. They’re workouts of humility however at the identical time nice freedom “.

The outcome works: the characters shout at one another meters away, in the center of the discipline. “I’m in a interval of lack! Of affection, of cash, of consideration, of enjoyable!”, Says its protagonist. And we perceive it. Betting on a comedy is, indubitably, a director’s generosity. With that dandy, romantic and timeless protagonist, and between interval attire and references to Fb, social relationships are put to the test with the repeated disappointments of 5 ladies who lose persistence with a person who fails to produce and is afraid of areas public. Dialog after dialog, that nearly pastoral fiction turns into acquainted to us and reminds us, loudly, earlier than we overlook, of what we’ve simply skilled.

by Aina Riu

@aina_rv

This text is written in Spanish for El Séptimo Arte, and any translation or look in one other media is against the law and carried out with out the consent of the writer.

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