Généalogies d’un crime

text IFFR 2004:Genealogies of a Crime can be viewed as an elaborate game with the conventions of film noir, a psychoanalytic murder mystery that pushes the fatalism of the noir genre to new and revealing limits: it is explicitly narrative itself that has taken the place of destiny, storytelling owning up for its own cruelties rather than disguising itself in a concept of fate. Yet, no matter how playful, the sense of omnipotent, vampiric events displacing and feeding off helpless, disorientated characters creates a powerful undertow of profound unease. There can be very few cinematic creations in which human freedom and self-determination count for as little as they do in the Ruizian universe. Ruiz’s framing creates a baroque distance between the viewer and the often semi-somnambulant prisoners of narrative that people this film. Objects are filled with an energy which characters do not possess. The outward strength and glamour of Catherine Deneuve’s persona is well used here to cover with the illusion of substance the character of Solange that is in effect a blank slate, a passive shell drifting along on the central flow of plot. Stories and ideas have a life of their own; it is they that control bodies, not people. Maximilian Le Caintext IFFR 1998:The most recent feature by festival veteran Raul Ruiz, and a film on a grand scale by his standards, was inspired by an anecdote from psychoanalysis. Around the turn of the 20th century, a child psychologist discovered murderous tendencies in her five-year-old nephew. While she studied him, waiting for a real murder, he murdered her. Those were the facts of the case.René (Melvil Poupaud) is the young nephew on trial and is defended by the female lawyer Solange (Cathérine Deneuve). Solange wants to illuminate the subtle relationship that has existed for many years between the victim (the aunt) and the culprit (the nephew). At first it looks as if the aunt did not only want to explain the obsessive behaviour of her nephew, but also wanted to test a new theory. And the boy did not just want to punish his aunt for her curiosity, but also accepted her irresistible ‘invitation’ to commit a murder. During Solange’s investigation, the case however takes a surprising turn. The boy becomes increasingly convinced that his lawyer and his dead aunt are one and the same person. At the same time, Solange starts to see her client as the reincarnation of her own son who died in a car crash. After the boy is acquitted, Solange falls in love with him and moves in. The vicious circle looks as if it is about to start again…