La frontière de l’aube

‘On the day that the last concentration camp survivor dies, World War III will start,’ says a young photographer in bed to the blonde actress with whom he is having an affair. Anyone choosing such reflections as pillow talk will not be satisfied with anything less than burning passion in the most fatal romantic tradition. That’s also what happens. His lover asks whether he will still love her when their sex is no longer good, if she’s ill or crazy. In the end their love proves able to break through death itself.
Philippe Garrel directs his son Louis in the male lead, with Laura Smet and Clémentine Poidatz as counterpoints in love. The drama, while set in the present, displays an anachronistic mood: people communicate with handwritten notes, in the psychiatric clinic men in white coats give electroshock therapy and the photographer has to use a darkroom. The form is also refreshingly old-fashioned: clean black-and-white photography, unhurried scenes that flow calmly into each other and sparse piano and violin sounds .
But in the end, it’s all about love. At the party someone explains ‘the law of the windscreen wipers’, which means that one lover runs away when the other approaches and the other way around. His partner in conversation suggests an alternative pair of windscreen wipers that move towards each other. ‘That’s friendship,’ the first concludes.

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