Il était une fois dans l'est

If the well-known cliché that painting is the art of addition and photography is the art of reduction holds true, then this film proves that cinematography is the art of unifying opposites: the layering of unnatural makeup on both female and male faces and thus their symbolic hypocrisy is perfectly supported by a natural yet "artificially" composed, meaningful and essential camera, which, with its zooms, allows the characters' faces to emerge against a reduced, often monochromatic background. In fact, an empty background... The synthesis of a swollen dream of an unrecognized drag queen - who passes dreams off as reality - with a "new wave" intermezzo of a dream of one of the characters, which is entirely shot in detail on an empty background of one's destiny, gradually engulfing all the others. And the viewer. But there is not only pessimism here, as this film seems to be growing and surpassing its background: a small illusory world of the stage of the drag show - a small town and its little people - a small French-speaking province in the flood of the big world. A big world that, however, encloses us in brackets and allows us to glimpse through a truly feminized and bittersweet sympathetic eye into the great little histories of ordinary and less ordinary lives. (2024.02.03)