Claire Simon
France | 2002 | 105 min
Language : French
Subtitle : English
Mimi Chiola is talking. Talking to us, through the woman that is filming her, among the sounds and places that run though her veins. There is Nice and its intimate topography, which wears the colour and perfume of her first, homosexual, desires, and then Saorge, the hinterland where she “keeps her dreams”. Mimi does not wander the Promenade des Anglais, she tells her story in fragments, during stops in everyday places (façades, streets, railway tracks, etc.), which are all syncopations—in the musical sense—in which she holds her breath. She takes the opportunity to look around her and take the measure of her life in the depth of focus given by the time that has passed. In this film, Claire Simon harvests the novel of life, waiting for her friend to remember an impression in the immediate present of the shot. The camera, on a stand, becomes the catalyst of the moment where the place, even if it does not belong strictly speaking to the protagonist’s memory, rekindles a recollection that penetrates her body and, in an intense pendulum movement, charges the setting that brought it to life. Mimi is a documentary fugue that paints the mental landscape of a free woman.
Emmanuel Chicon
