Le carré de la fortune
Pascale Bodet and Emmanuel Levaufre
France, 2007, 160 min, colour, French
“Renoir was known for his digressions, for his parentheses within parentheses. (...) And from tangent to tangent, from digression to digression, he ended up talking in the digressions about the main topic that he had left for later...”. The person who says this is an ageing film critic, Michael, Delahaye, and this film is his portrait, made by two young film buffs, Pascale Bodet and Emmanuel Levaufre, who set out to interview him, to have a dialogue with him, but come up against a man who prefers to give monologues, enter into digressions and evade questions but who, at the same time, is answering them, giving them the chance to turn this film buff documentary into something else: a film about a life and its secrets, a mystery novel with no final answer, the portrait of a man who has improvised his life but who, while improvising, drifting at random, perhaps remained true to himself.