Wild Innocence

A film director is making a new film against the use of heroin, but the producers of that film are people who sell heroin. The contradiction sits on top of the whole enterprise and opens the question of what money a well meant project stands on. The film passes no moral verdict and does not resolve the contradiction either; it watches the people who go on working inside it. The account gives the life of the set, the search for money and personal relationships all folded together. Addiction here is as much a condition surrounding everyone as it is a subject. Philippe Garrel’s construction is plain: long takes, little music, black and white. That it arrives at no conclusion is a deliberate choice. Julia Faure and Mehdi Belhaj Kacem appear in the hundred and twenty three minute French film, completed in 2001.