L’oeil de l’autre

L’oeil de l’autre can be described as a drama about growing up in the form of a mysterious landscape film. Alice (Julie Depardieu in another convincing role) is a young photographer who is hired by the French Ministry of Nature and the Environment to take a series of photographs of the mountainous landscape of the Haute Provence. She is replacing the renowned English photographer Peter Holm, who started on the project seven years earlier but suddenly disappeared, without anyone knowing why or where to. Alice has to take exactly the same photographs as he, on the same day, at the same time and from the same location: a form of landscape preservation. She regards herself more as a technician than a photographer, but slowly starts to see her surroundings – through the lens – with other eyes. In the photographs taken by her predecessor, she discovers minor details that spark her curiosity about the missing Mr Holm (in the photo we see of him, we recognise no one less than Otar Iosseliani!). One of those details leads her to Juliet, the photographer’s lover. Just like the beautiful landscape she is photographing (for the second time), Alice undergoes a change. At first she is shy and headstrong and refuses to look outside the frame. But when she is confronted with the gaze of an old man, Alice starts getting interested in the noisy guests at her hotel. (GT)