IRENE

France, 2009, 80 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Alain Cavalier.

Alain Cavalier has made films like Therese and Libera Me which are artificially staged, word-driven, usually poetic and symbolic and have a determined preference for contemplation over action.

Recently, as he has moved into his mid-70s and beyond, he has filmed himself as film-maker (the title of his 2005 film).

This time he peruses and reads from diaries of 1970-1972 and his love for and obsession with actress, Irene, who is terminally ill. This provides memories, nostalgia, much rumination about his feelings, his film-making processes in the past (with a clip from La Chamade with Catherine Deneuve embodying Irene) as well as contemporary films, his ageing, a severe fall on an escalator and, again, modern film-making.

Cavalier appears on screen several times but it is commentary and edited images that may be too specialised even for a French audiences and maybe too Gallic in tone, references and rhetorical style for world audiences, apart from cineastes. His low-key and mellow-aged voiceover runs the danger for the drowsy of being ultimately soporific.

1.The work of Alain Cavalier? His career? Films in old age?

2.The visual style, poetic, symbolic?

3.Cavalier and his preference for contemplation rather than action?

4.The autobiographical aspects of the film, his past, film-making, processes, the present, his ageing, his accident?

5.Cavalier as an older man, his work, his processes for filming, his remembering, the importance of the fall on the escalator?

6.Irene, the memories, the clip with Catherine Deneuve, describing her, her work, love for her, obsession, erotic? Her illness, her death, funeral?

7.The use of the diaries, the visualising of the diaries, reading from them in voice-over? The self-revelation?

8.The portrait of Cavalier in old age, film as a means of self-revelation?