Excess Will Save Us

A young filmmaker returns to the village where she was born – a hamlet in the north of France – to investigate a strange story about a terrorist threat. She starts with members of her own family, and doesn’t have to go much further. The misunderstanding – as it turns out to be – shows above all how alarmist news items and political machinations in the cities can take on a life of their own, deep in the hinterland.

It is not so unusual for a filmmaker to expand a short into a feature film. But whereas this usually involves the same narrative being extended and deepened, here Morgane Dziurla-Petit takes a more idiosyncratic path. Her 2019 short, almost unchanged, makes up the first fifteen minutes of this new film, in which she then investigates what happens to these people afterwards – including being confronted by themselves upon seeing the short, and the premiere of that film at a major festival.

The result is a playfully unfolding narrative on family ties, as close as they are constricting. By adding a number of fictional elements to a real tale of her family, Dziurla-Petit is able to get closer to the essence. This hybrid form also reflects the position of the filmmaker herself: simultaneously intimately connected and an outsider. Because she managed to escape from the village – something both her father, an amiable man in his sixties, and her seventeen-year-old niece would love to do. However, the film also immaculately reveals the beauty of their rather absurd existence.