A LA VIE! - 6 - Ее звали Никита | La Femme Nikita - стр. 16

Артикль ''Манер смерти''
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Ниже какая-то добрая душа перевела на английский

Luc Perreault
La Presse

The second feature movie of Francis Leclerc starts as a thriller. Lying on a hospital bed, an unconscious man turned into a living puzzle.
Will we ever know the name of the mysterious driver who abandoned him close to the road while attempting to euthanize an injured deer? Is this
the same guy who, taking advantage of the the darkness, came to switch off the life support of the man in a coma? We'll have to wait till the end
of the movie for the nightmare experienced by Alexandre Tourneur (RoyDupuis) clarifies a little bit, just enough to leave space for maybe another
nightmare.

Affective Memories talks indeed about the forgotten past, whether this past has been forgotten as a consequence of a violent trauma, or the one
that the person has blocked away because it became too painful, these affective memories, precisely, that weight so heavily on the conscience
when they are accompanied by guilt.

The story takes place in Charlevoix in a snowy landscape that tends to erase the traces just like this selective memory that has already allowed
Alexandre to wipe out his past. Reduced to a new born state, forgetful of his forgotten, he engages now in a search for each tiny bit of his
personal history. Turning into his own investigator, he questions everybody around him. A psychiatrist (Maka Kotto) and a policewoman
(Rosa Zacharie), his only support in this quivering world, help him put together the pieces of this disheveled mesh.

The answers to Alexandre's questions come to him in pieces, like breaking points accompanying a particular image processing, like those sepia
photos pasted in an old album. Moreover, several of these witnesses contradict each other. Thus, his daughter Sylvaine (Karine Lagueux) says that he
was a wonderful man before reproaching him that he was an alcoholic absentee father. Including Patrick (Benot Gouin), his associate in his veterinary
clinic, presented as a long time friend, but all of a sudden becoming distant. Stolen memories, the cineaste has already explained.

The film is original in as much as it tries to make a connection between two stages of our cinematography. In the beginning, the thriller approach
that surrenders to a more modern fashion, that of this kind of cinema. At the end, a personal quest that makes the link with the tradition of
identity cinema. In Alexandre, we find the traces of the orphan cinema for which Jutra (in My Uncle Antoine, for example) was one of the most
brilliant illustrators.

Having tried to embellish his story, Alexandre ends up accepting the unflattering mirror that he's being presented. The pop of a license plaque
marked by a Je me souviens - "I remember", suggests that his amnesia could be collective. But Francis Leclerc doesn't seek to limit this
quest of a collective conscience, that we can see as the metaphor of his film, in a traditional spirit. His village includes the new Quebec presence
(the policewoman and the doctor) as well as the Native American memory (represented by Alexandre's hallucination in innu and by the last song
by Florent Vollant).

Roy Dupuis plays this patched man with a rare honesty. Thanks to the precision of his acting, his calibrated stuttering, also thanks to the
sober but convincing acting of the rest of the cast, especially Rosa Zacharie and Maka Kotto, Affective Memories establishes itself as an
author film demanding but well mastered.

translation by Dana V