SPECTATEURS !
Spectateurs ! (Filmlovers!) Arnaud Desplechin’s love letter to the cinema
Over the years, the Festival de Cannes has been closely linked to the filmography of Arnaud Desplechin. One of his recurring characters, Paul Dédalus, made his first appearance on the big screen in Competition in 1996 in Comment je me suis disputé…(My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument). He returns twenty-eight years later in a Special Screening of Spectateurs !, an ode to the movie theatre.
“Going to the cinema – what does that mean? Why have we been going for more than 100 years? I wanted to celebrate cinemas and their magic. It’s a blend of memories, fiction and research… A torrent of images to sweep us away.” That is how Arnaud Desplechin describes his work on Spectateurs!
In this celebratory film, the director revisits the character of Paul Dédalus played by Mathieu Amalric in Comment je me suis disputé… and Quentin Dolmaire inTrois souvenirs de ma jeunesse (My Golden Days, 2015). In Spectateurs ! Desplechin depicts the character on screen at four different times in his life, played successively by Louis Birman (aged 6), Milo Machado-Graner (aged 14) , Sam Chemoul (aged 22) and Salif Cissé (aged 30), and has him experience a cinematic saga.
“Paul Dédalus is someone who loves admiring the people around him. So I used the same surname, which also alludes to the labyrinthine narrative.”
The film was conceived as a tender coming-of-age story of cinemagoers, and quotes various films, from Fantomas to Shoah. It plunges us into a sensory experience, recreating that unique atmosphere – the noise of a ripped ticket, the velvet of the seat – which conveys the individual and collective experience.
“The cinema is the most democratic place there is.”
Beyond the movie theatre, Desplechin enhances Spectateurs ! by opening other windows on to the art of cinema, such as cinema clubs and television: places which expand, feed and sometimes create our appetite for the cinema.
