Léger tremblement du paysage

A village, somewhere in France in the 1960s, on the eve of the space age. An artist paints cloudy skies. A gym teacher tests the influence of tyre pressure on the performance of his rally car. Two children build a rocket. A lab technician investigates something. A mechanic is looking for extraterrestrial life. In the meantime, they think about the heavens. And then the earth shakes slightly. The gym teacher discovers the cause in his Ford Anglia, in a hilarious way. Life goes on, but nothing is the same.
A Faint Trembling of the Landscape is an eccentric film that, in its tone, meshes well with the short film Discovering the World (2002) by the same maker. In this film, that can be summarised in a few words, Philippe Fernandez confirms the idiosyncrasy of his work. With laid-back humour, he shows his universe as a confusing fable, with a profundity that gives the viewer no handhold at all. At the same time, he stimulates with his eye for décors and dress and takes time to work out details and philosophise about the evolution of man, his destiny and his place in the universe.