We Had the Day Bonsoir

A love song for the dead, We Had the Day Bonsoir reaches beyond mourning and eulogy – towards something eternal. With fragments of intimate documentary sound and film, Narimane Mari captures a vivid yet oblique portrait of her late partner, the painter Michel Haas. It’s an ode to a specific life through the eyes and ears of his lover, but also to life itself.

Through her eyes, we see someone full of that life right up to his final days: on all fours painting in the dirt, laughing childlike at Chaplin, swearing at the camera. But Mari seems more concerned with listening: to voicemail epiphanies between the two lovers, to an unanswered plea from Haas’s doctor, to the lapping of waves. With these lyrical fragments, the film often ponders along with Haas and Mari about the impossibility of endings. How the ‘illusion’ of time passing clashes with the will of human stories, and of art, to endure.

“Every soul is a melody that needs to be renewed”, Mari says, bidding us listen. Because, the film keeps reminding us, what we see intimately of Haas and his work is only a glimpse of what always remains – just off frame, out of earshot, after the final cut.

– Callum McLean