Three adventures by Pascale Bodet

... he talked a lot, but he didn't like people talking to him.

Pascale Bodet makes films. Sometimes they're documentaries. Sometimes they're fiction. The documentaries are often portraits. The fictions are, in a way, comedies with a distinctive, brusque appeal. All her films have a family air to them and, like the members of all families, they're different. It isn't a matter of repeating herself or of having a particular style, but of making films that are a new adventure every time. You have to go out and look for adventure, and what you look for may in the end prove to be something you can't really achieve: to put yourself for a moment, however, briefly, in another person's place. Last year, in the Official Section of Punto de Vista, we were able to see one of her adventures, Baleh-baleh. Baleh-baleh was various things; among them, it was a story about just this, about putting yourself in another person's place, about being something else (merchant, king, sun, cloud, stone, stonecutter) only to finally end up being yourself. This time we'll see another three adventures by Pascale Bodet: Le carré de la fortune, Porte sans clé and Presque un siècle. They are films that seem to progress in an open way but which always have a secret, a different story that goes on under the surface. For a film to have a secret is proof that something living happened when it was filmed, that the film took a bigger risk than was intended, and is also a kind of generosity: the film trusts us, the viewers. It trusts in our intelligence, in our desire to venture out and perhaps get it wrong, to see a sun where really there was a cloud or, in the end, a stone. Le carré de la fortune [The Square of Fortune], a portrait of an ageing film critic, Michel Delahaye, becomes the tale of a mystery without a solution. Presque un siècle [Nearly a century], a portrait of the film-maker's grandfather becomes the portrait of a friendship and an unsettling comedy about death. Porte sans clef [Door Without a Key], a fiction bordering on the absurd, conceals a realist film about the anxiety of having or not having a roof over one's head. And all of them are, among other things, films about stubbornness and the art of not listening, as if people reveal something more important when we refuse to talk than when we talk freely. Until you come up against this stubbornness you can't actually be in the other person's place. Until you stop feeling that this - putting yourself in another person's place - can't be done, you haven't met them. Pascale Bodet's films venture further, to a point where the ground and reality become unstable and changing. Comedy and reality, gravity and fun, meet at once amid the unstable. And instability is also the setting for one of the secret threads woven between these three adventures by director Pascale Bodet, a kind of meeting of different generations, an ability to be together without entirely listening, as if the film-maker were at times the cabin boy accompanying the old pirate, someone who has already had all their adventures and, in a changing world, is not about to change anymore.

Curated and notes by Pablo García Canga