Morlaix

Three Breton teens watch a film that mimics their romantic lives, which smudges the boundaries between experiencing and witnessing. Their love triangle takes shape in unexpected ways in Jaime Rosales’ beguiling new feature, which deeply contemplates love, choice, and fate.

In the cozy titular Breton city, teenage Gwen has just lost her mother. Her charming and handsome new Parisian classmate, Jean-Luc, captivates herself and her friends. The sentimental Jean-Luc clashes with Gwen’s boyfriend Thomas, but he’s not afraid to express his interest and retains an endlessly hopeful attitude toward loving her. An oddly familiar film that they all watch together piques a conversation between them about the inevitability and irrationality of love, foreshadowing a multiplicity of different futures that lie ahead.
 
The lives of the love-triangled teens and what they watch on screen thus become layers on a light table: an endless realm of possibilities of equal importance as illuminated by Jaime Rosales. With Morlaix, the filmmaker blends still and moving images to craft a lyrical and intriguing piece of meta-realism. As Rosales plays with frames, aspect ratios, colour, silences and time, lines between realities are blurred. Echoes of technical experimentation and spirited desire from narratives of the French New Wave lead into a fascinating meditation on choices, possibilities and free will.

– Olivia Popp
 

Trailer

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