Emergency Kisses

Mathieu, a film director, hires a famous actress to play a character based on his wife. His wife wants to act herself, and having the part taken from her opens a crack in the marriage that never closes. The film tells that crack not through a scene of argument but through a cooling spread over months. The genuinely strange part lies in the production itself: the director’s own family play versions of themselves in this film, so that fiction and life enter the same frame. The account does not use this as a trick but makes it part of the question the film is asking. Brigitte Sy and Louis Garrel appear in Philippe Garrel’s eighty three minute French film, completed in 1989.