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It’s clear that Carax is troubled by questions of how cinema evolves in the present day, amid the deluge of glancing visual representations that make up our modern media landscape. Even within the explosion of ideas that he playfully detonates in “C’est Pas Moi,” the questions he’s asking reflect larger existential concerns. Not even a triumphant late-breaking performance of “Modern Love” (linking “Mauvais Sang” to “Annette” and in doing so collapsing two poles of Carax’s career into another kind of animal locomotion) can completely assuage the sense of a filmmaker who feels nothing less than the image itself is under threat in our modern times.
Equally exultant but far more reverential in its lyrical, golden-hued tribute to the cinematic experience is Arnaud Desplechin’s “Spectateurs! (“Filmlovers!”), presented as a Special Screening at Cannes this year.
Emotionally overwhelming in its embrace of the collective audience, of the community that forms in a theater once the lights go down and images projected on a screen transport us to another place, Desplechin’s novelistic docufiction is awash in cinematic and literary references but offers up each with a extraordinarily light touch; here, the viewers of the images matter more than their creators.
Desplechin effortlessly shifts through layers of fiction and reality in order to explore the fluidity with which great filmmaking, and our experience of it, blurs boundaries between the two. To that end, Desplechin’s own relationship with cinema is reflected through the narration of his recurring character, Paul Dédalus (who previously appeared, played by Mathieu Amalric, across “My Sex Life,” “My Golden Days,” and “A Christmas Tale”).
His name an allusion to James Joyce’s alter ego in “Ulysses,” Dédalus has existed in Desplechin’s cinema as a distancing device, a fictional surrogate for the director himself, and a common man with whom any audience member can identify. Amalric appears at the corners of Desplechin’s frame, delivering introductory voice-over in English and taking on a cameo at the film’s conclusion; instead, Paul is played as a child (Louis Birman), a teenager (Milo Machado-Graner, from last year’s “Anatomy of a Fall”), in his twenties (Sam Chemoul), and in his thirties (Salif Cissé), at each age reflecting on formative experiences of spectatorship.
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