Parc
Arnaud des Pallières
France | 2008 | 90 min
Language : French
Subtitle : English
In a residential suburb of an American city, the lives of two men come into contact with tragic consequences. With a dry style, characters shaped from the bodies of the actors and a structure that goes against the grain, des Pallières adapts a story by John William Cheever, capturing the poetry of his work and its haunting portrayal of the American middle classes.
In a residential suburb of an American city, the lives of two men – a happy, respectable family man and a wealthy bachelor at war with everyone and everything – come into contact with tragic consequences. This is the subject, taken from a novel by John William Cheever, that des Pallières uses to create his most daring and difficult film. Adapting a literary text is a major challenge for any filmmaker. ”Betraying” the work in terms of its content while respecting its form and spirit – departing from the literal description and attempting to transpose the writer’s art by an equivalent act of creation – is the approach most fraught with risk. Adopting a dry style, a structure that goes against the grain, and shaping his characters from the bodies of his actors, des Pallières successfully meets the challenge. He renders Cheever’s story while capturing the poetry of his work, based on a haunting description of the American middle classes. In Parc, their complexity and duplicity, and the contrast between their longing for respectability and deep-seated moral corruption, is coldly and explosively analysed.
Luciano Barisone (Translation BMP Translations)
