Perdrix
It was worth working through nearly all of the films in competition to get here. This is the winner. An original inverted anti-romantic comedy that finds comfort in deadpan absurdities of human behavior and draws a facade of eccentric characters, a facade because they’re actually rooted in the flesh of ordinary people. We are allotted a gentle dissection of the manic pixie dream girl’s authentic presentation, and as we watch her as just one of many examples, we realize how all of these common caricatures and even the accompanying silly humor of genre films really hint with distance at human truths. This film levels the playing field and shortens the distance, creating an intimate and vulnerable space to confront such psychological and social rhetorical questions and is content with seeing them as both universal in generalization and special in experience.
The film is ultimately about how people become honest with themselves and with one another through the presence of another human being, and in Erwan Le Duc’s world his characters wear their defense mechanisms and personalities on their sleeves side by side as if they were the same (aren’t they?), putting up barriers while simultaneously shedding them. They put their core beliefs out in the open to be chiseled away at- whether by their own hands or most often others’ - relentlessly, sometimes without even realizing it, and yet the mood of this is so conscientious with warmth it melts the icy aggressiveness and reveals it to be another reactionary part protecting the emotional tissue of the exposed soul. The offbeat characters and desire to connect are there per usual, but the eye into the idiosyncrasies is multidimensional and cuts through the typical cloth to admire humanity in all its beautiful pain, innocent fear, and peculiar joy.
There is a Wes Anderson vibe to some of the comedy/pathos blends, and a good-natured lighthearted optimism with eclectic humor covering stark realities about the limitations of perspective and social dynamics that is reminiscent of Mouret. The boldness of these people and their social environment even recalls a raw and unsculpted Miranda July film of searing emotions with intentionally less control over its humor and surrealism that flies out of the shadows to provoke our senses, just like in real life but with a light twist- not too much to disbar a relationship with the viewer and just enough to bleed more sobriety into the truth of spirit. In this picture characters are people and vice versa, and the film essentially declares that the 'quirky' and the 'real' exist inside of one another, something indie rom-coms have been trying to access for decades with only few succeeding with authenticity. Maybe we are like earthworms, beings of contradictions, comprehensive of opposite yet reciprocal parts, adhering to sensibility and instability. Perhaps we need to be unique in solitude and know ourselves just as much as we need to love another and share ourselves. Maybe 'serenity comes to the self-centered,' as one character positions to make another speechless, prompting a difficult yet brave act that works against socially celebrated choices but is absolutely righteous all the same. I don’t know, but the film is hilarious and alive and touching, has the funniest police station scenes and musical performance in recent memory, demonstrates deftness as it transitions from magical to solemn within so many scenes, is as philosophically dense and emotionally intelligent as it is satirical while never condescending, and so far is the year’s best film. More than anything, it makes one grateful for the adventure that is life and inspires us to believe that we can all be our own unique version of Robinson Crusoe if we take a leap of faith and become honest with ourselves.
