Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, “Et j’aime à la fureur” is a deeply personal journey into the memories and imagination of the French film director.
By John Lavitt
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/19/2022 – From the beginning of this kaleidoscopic ‘documentary’ dive into a man’s history and soul, director André Bonzel makes the audience partners in his creative journey. The director is asking us not just to come along, but also to take part in the creation. Without blinking and with complete confidence in the certainty of his artistic approach, Bonzel lets us know from the beginning, “If you don’t have childhood memories, you might as well invent them.”
Known for the European cult film “Man Bites Dog” (1992), many people wondered when André Bonzel would return to the director’s chair. Celebrated by critics and audiences alike, André Bonzel co-directed the Belgian black comedy crime mockumentary with Rémy Belvaux and star Benoît Poelvoorde. Thirty years later, he returns alone to the director’s chair and delivers a memorable triumph.
Premiering in the Cannes Classic Section at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, “Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By” is a true artistic achievement of the highest caliber. Once it begins, we are on a roller-coaster ride into an archeological excavation of memories and time. After inheriting boxes of homemade reels from a family member, Bonzel decides to create a postmodern collage of the past. Trying to find himself as well as his ancestors, the director dives into dozens of amateur archives, which he has been passionately collecting since he was young.
As a child, a sweet home movie of an unknown girl and her family on vacation became Bonzel’s signpost for what a happy family should be. Fetishizing the film, he evolves into voyeur of other people’s homemade movies, trying to find meaning in the attempt of everyday souls to capture the best of their lives. When he inherits the box of reels that contain his own life and flickering images of his ancestors, he realizes that he must weave the stories and pictures together to create a visually transcendent tapestry.
For André Bonzel, the meaning of the project resides somewhere between the goalposts of creative expression and sexual desire. Although a latent resentment towards his father lingers in the beginning, Bonzel chooses to transcend the pain. Instead, he focuses on the peculiar beauty of past lives barely known and the creative expression of filling in the gaps. By finding connections through homemade films to both strangers and his ancestors, he not only connects to them all but also coopts the details and events of their lives.
By filling in the gaps and making new connections, Bonzel composes a siren song for the postmodern deconstruction of life. Since the metaphysics of presence is essentially constructed at all levels, it makes sense to intermingle fantasy with reality. We pay tribute to the project if gaps exist in the story by filling them in. Thus, as an audience, we become co-creators with Bonzel by celebrating and even finishing by the act of viewership his new edited reality. With a tremendous musical score by Benjamin Biolay supporting every scene, we happily take the journey.
What is so remarkable about “Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By” is rarely has a film been able to balance an undeniable sweetness and caring with such theoretical underpinnings. In the director’s construction of the narrative, even if it is born of a deep love of the medium and his sources, Bonzel underscores a theoretical interpretation of modern reality. Our ghosts of loves gone by, our memories of the past, would be profoundly different and would not flicker without the medium of film.
With the democratization of homemade filmmaking in the twentieth century through the advent of technologies, every human being became a potential recorder of stories and memories. Technology gave us the illusion and the momentary freedom of lasting value. Although we act in homemade movies as if our creations will last forever, most are lost and forgotten within a generation. Such loss is a secret tragedy for Bonzel, and it is what he battles by making this film.
Although André Bonzel loves the people in the films, it does not ultimately matter whether he knew them, whether he was related to them, or whether their stories are even based on a flickering reality. What matters is that they exist on film to be reimagined in a new century. Indeed, “Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By” is a reclamation project in which moving images that were almost lost are recovered and redeemed. As an audience, we participate in that recovery process and share in the beauty of that redemption.
(Photos: Barthélemy Thumerelle, Matt Johnson, and André Bonzel)
