Proust Maniquerville

The actress Françoise Lebrun goes to the senior citizen center in Maniquerville to read Proust. This is the frame. But one is not surprised by the fact that Creton broadens this frame to a dimension foreign to the customary sociological fatalism. After all, his project is the free but scrupulously loyal adaptation of “La Recherche du Temps Perdu”. As if the characters left the pages to turn, before our eyes, into the listeners of the narration of their own life and the spectators of their own decrepitude. A fantastic conjuring trick that is more thrilling than a sad stock-taking exercise, MANIQUERVILLE schemes. What exactly? Metamorphoses. To transform, for example, through the grace of the shot/reverse shot technique, the face of an old lady into a white flower. To return the ravages of residents’ time to the great building they used to inhabit in former times, this Proustian dwelling, now destined for destruction. To evoke, from the immobility of a wheelchair, the memories of going to the seaside. To mention just a few. Nothing here is stable, and Françoise Lebrun and her sidekick Clara Le Picard, an activity leader at the center, stress this at the end, laughing openly about a two-person reading of a text by Blanchot that has comic passages, paradoxically rambling on about the immense generosity of fatigue. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)

In the presence of Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré.