My Mexican Bretzel

The film begins with silent images: archives of Swiss pilots during the Second World War. When the sound appears, it does so gradually and with great subtlety: the swish of a wing, a step in the cabin, the vibrations of a plane’s engine… As for the story, it is driven by a beautiful text: borrowed from the journals that Vivian Barret kept with precision and like a novel. Crossing the world and the 20th century with glamour, she is a personality whose lifestyle was one dreams are made of, in a fresco of personal archives, in lively and saturated colours, recorded by her husband. “Lies are just another way of telling the truth,” the epigraphical quotation of My Mexican Bretzel briefly enlightens us about another possible reading of this story. But Vivian’s account, full of adventures, naturally carries us away in her quest for happiness and love. We will not wonder about the source of the incredible materials that make up the film until the end. An opportunity to reflect retroactively on the question of documentary and fiction, or that of true and false in filmmaking.

Madeline Robert