#2 To have and have not - girls have it too !
Notre Dame by Valérie Donzelli
« What I love about cinema is that it makes us believe in the impossible. » Valérie Donzelli
From her first short film Il fait beau dans la plus belle ville du monde to the recent Notre Dame, Valérie Donzelli has asserted herself as a director of zany, improvised and imaginative comedies, nourished by the accidents and wanderings of adult life.
Notre Dame, which takes the world of architecture as its setting, goes a little further than her previous movies and satirizes urban planning policies through the unexpected portrait of a chaotic Paris, given over to all kinds of disturbances.
That is indeed in a Paris drenched by perpetual rain, where the radio pours out catastrophic information at all times, that Maud Crayon, a Parisian architect and mother of two children, wins a competition to redesign the square of Notre Dame. Despite the fact that her project wins the competition, her work is rejected by the general public, to Maud's great despair. At the same time, Bacchus Renard, a teenage love, resurfaces and her ex-husband, Martial, moves in with her against her will.
From the outset, Maud Crayon is thus introduced as a woman under pressure, and this at all levels : the boss of the architecture agency bullies her, she has to balance her work and her life as a single mother, not to mention the love troubles she is in, between her ex-husband and her lover.
However, Valérie Donzelli amazes by her ability to convert the faults of modern life (work pressure, precariousness, incivilities, the hypocrisy of politicians) into a comic and combative energy, which also appears as a survival manual for her protagonist Maud Crayon. The dynamic editing, the lines exchanged as if in ping-pong game, the unpredictable gestures and attitudes (for instance passers-by giving one another big slaps in the street) define a rough shaggy freewheeling type of comedy, where the eccentricity of the protagonists is a response to the aggressiveness of the world. Each scene is thus a new arena of play, where the actors are free to push the limits of reality, to resort to almost childish jokes.
By portraying herself as a disoriented eccentric woman, Donzelli brings together the burlesque and the absurd to portray contemporary society in the style of a modern Tati.
The freewheeling tone of Notre Dame undoubtedly attracts anyone who watches it. The film is part of a hybrid form of cinema, which experiments to serve the narrative, alternating between comedy, singing and dancing and with some forays into the supernatural. By moving away from naturalism to explore the possibilities offered by fantasy, Donzelli manages to take the necessary distance to see the world from another angle and invites us, the viewers, to dream of another world : funnier, more surprising, more alive!
