“Sorda”, by Eva Libertad
This young couple who will soon have a child seem to be living in such perfect happiness that one wonders at first whether it is a story or an advertisement. That it quickly becomes apparent that the woman, Angela, is deaf seems to further increase the idyllic, if not artificial, side of her life with the charming Hector. The way in which this state of grace will be called into question after the birth of the child is the dramatic driving force of a film which, sequence after sequence, turns out to be much less simple than it seemed.
No major tragedy will strike the couple, the baby, the caring family, the caring friends, the colleagues at the artisanal pottery business where Angela works. And it is precisely the disturbances, otherwise insidious, where nothing is entirely predictable, which make up the inner dynamic of the first feature film by Spanish filmmaker Eva Libertad.
It is interesting, but not essential, to know that Angela’s interpreter, Miriam Garlo, is actually deaf and that she is the director’s sister – which means that she has a close relationship with what this disability entails.
The difficulties, gaps, conflicts, impasses and doubts will multiply around the young mother and, within herself, the questions linked not only to deafness as such, but to multiple modalities of “difference”.
They also concern mixed couples, here hearing/non-hearing, but diversity is at the principle of the notion of couple. They concern the use or not of prostheses, in this case hearing aids, but there are many other types. They concern the risk of transmission to the child, which can occur in many registers.
They concern the organization of public space, the view of others, even benevolent ones, the very idea of inclusiveness, at all scales. They question the uses of language, here of signed language, by whom, with what effects of sharing or on the contrary between oneself…
All these questions unfold from the precise situation recounted by Sordawhere the idyllic beginning serves as a zero point to accompany multiple developments in a very concrete way. They unfold from situations explicitly linked to Angela’s deafness and the quality of her relationships with those close to her, but soon resonate with broader questions, around forms of exclusion, isolation, withdrawal into oneself or a group, difficulty in managing one’s impulses and anxieties, which go far beyond the sole theme of deafness.
Without complacency with anyone, with affection for each and everyone, the film accompanies these trajectories, their bifurcations, their slippages. Above all, Eva Libertad mobilizes the cinema’s own resources for this questioning which, at times, becomes a crisis.
They concern in particular two devices activated with great invention and accuracy. Very quickly, the film uses subtitles of different colors, corresponding to the status of the speakers and their way of communicating. There is no need to decipher the exact color code of this rainbow spelling, the real benefit is to make visible the multiplicity of relationships to words, depending on who emits them and who receives them.
Then, during the last part, the soundtrack is modified to give a sensation, necessarily approximate, of the way in which Angela perceives her environment. And it is both very direct – in the domain of sensations – and very nuanced: nothing to do with an opaque and uniform silence, or a simple reduction in sound volume.
Sorda is a film particularly attentive to what deafness causes, a word which itself designates multiple and very unequal situations. It provides access to questions and reactions that concern all of what is, socially and administratively, considered as disabilities – for the people who are directly concerned, as well as for the able-bodied.
Without ever distancing itself from the experience and feelings of its central character, the film concerns in an even more comprehensive way the mechanisms of exclusion, the needs and limits of being part of a community, the challenge of multiplying the modalities of exchange, of “listening” in a sense which includes the deaf and all those who do not want to hear, or do not know.
“A balcony in Limoges”, by Jérôme Reybaud
She sleeps in her car, doesn’t care about the rules of the social game, has no credit card, no ID card, no vital card. She doesn’t want the RSA. And she doesn’t care about international crises and the suffering of others. She drinks, sleeps with whoever she wants, lies and cheats without malice or scruple.
She conscientiously does her work as a caregiver, cares about the dramas of the world and her neighborhood, and respects laws and customs. She has principles, no friends or companions, but a keen propensity to come to the aid of her neighbor, even when the latter has not asked for anything.
They, Gladys and Eugénie, were high school friends, ages ago. They met by chance in a parking lot. Each in its own way is endearing and horrifying. From a distance, from his window, the philosophy teacher observes what is happening in the apartment opposite – Eugénie’s – and comments, after which the flighty party girl more or less squats at the stuck-up loner’s house.
The second feature film by Jérôme Reybaud, discovered in 2016 with Days of Franceis a moral tale in a deadpan burlesque mode, enlightened by some endearing sidekicks. This will become Chabrol grand-guignolesque (Claude Chabrol who never tired of exploring how those who believe in goodness can become monsters).
The voice of the teacher, which seems to bear witness a posteriori to what happened, how it went crazy, then how it completely went down the drain, offers a sort of reasonable refuge from these two extremes that Fabienne Babe and Anne-Lise Heimburger have a lot of fun interpreting.
To maintain this tone defined by multiple excesses and a sense of the derisory nature of existence which can quickly become touting and contemptuous, it is necessary to have a very precise sense of tempo, of distances, of symmetries and asymmetries. You have to know how to give room for a minute of sincerity, in the darkness on this famous balcony, that of Eugénie’s apartment, where Gladys’s lover confides one evening. It takes the sadness of this man and that of the one who films him, to allow a worried irony to emerge while playing the game of the outrageous parable.
Jérôme Reybaud laughs about his libertarian tramp and his robotic nurse, but he is also afraid of them. We can clearly see that he enjoys filming the exuberance of Fabienne Babe and is embarrassed not to find an equivalent for the conformism that Anne-Lise Heimburger plays. Thanks to which A balcony in Limoges leaves a trail of turmoil as nuanced and uncertain as its sequences seemed affirmations and condemnations of vigorous completeness.
