COMME SUR DES ROULETTES

A word from the selection committee :

The slacker’s resistance (that of a young loafer at odds with society’s demands for productivity, as well as those of a largely regimented narrative cinema), that elusive obstinacy, becomes here a poetic, absurd driving force that almost sets Keigo Shimizu’s micro-tale rolling. There is indeed a (pointless) quest, a series of incidents, and even an ending – whose comic abruptness is pure genius. Yet everything here remains endearingly wayward. Money falls from the sky (but we’re still broke). Skateboarding is filmed in static shots, like a day’s work, while the camera, skimming just above the ground, records not the skater’s feats but a different view of the city, suddenly lifted from the unrelenting weight of the afternoon. Our slacker displays as much ill will as he makes – secretive, half-hearted – attempts to answer his mother. A cavernous bedroom houses the young musician’s ramshackle heaps of samples, a reclusive art of appropriation. An attentive artistry is similarly nestled in the film’s tender, sardonic composition – but this is an art that remains above all dangerously open to the air pockets of apparent idleness, to restless immobility, to the rough beauty and irritations of everyday life between mother and son, an island of grumbling proximity and repressed tenderness. 

Florence Maillard 

Traduction : Aurore Kahan