That Old Dream That Moves

Before L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake) catapulted Alain Guiraudie into another dimension, the high point of his work was Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream That Moves), a medium-length film that created such a stir at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2001 that Godard himself declared it to be the ‘best film in the Cannes Film Festival’. It is easy to see why the Franco-Swiss director, who was presenting Éloge de l'amour (In Praise of Love) that year, was so taken with the film. The main quality of Guiraudie’s cinema is its atmospheric density. Guiraudie makes us feel the weight of each word, of each silence, he makes us attentive to the part of reality in each frame, to the space covered by each camera movement, to the intensity of each colour. In Ce vieux rêve qui bouge, Chaplin’s Modern Times are over, and if the worker still goes to the factory, it is to wait for it to close – we imagine it has been relocated – or to dismantle the machines. This political fable looking at the last days of the proletariat is an opportunity to observe what still binds us once capitalism has come to a stop. Desire is all around, the desire to be together is satisfied, the desire to have sex is not. But attempts are made. With Guiraudie, the shot is a permanent meeting point, unique and singular. There are directors whose mise en scène imitates reality (an obsession with realism), those who overload it (the appeal of the spectacular) and finally those who purify it, subtracting and reorganising its elements (the sculptor of a new world). Guiraudie is undoubtedly one of the latter, one of those great filmmakers who have confronted the question of language, the language of words and the language of cinema of course, but also the language of bodies and their desires. (Bruno Deruisseau; Les Inrocks)