'Dialoguing with life': the pandemic that broke the adolescent intensity

Too much of adolescence is drowning in its own wound in a post-pandemic world. During a key time of its existence, the intensity consubstantial to age could not unfold outwards and overflowed inwards. The consequences are there and they are incalculable: the loss; with their minds, with their bodies.

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Christophe Honoré, a renowned French director of 53 years, with better and worse films, but always vibrant in their pain (recover Live quickly, love slowly), wanted to remember in Dialogando con la vida his own adolescence, a key moment in his family, emotional, sentimental and sexual life, in which he also saw his father die. However, not by chance, it has set it in the long months of exit from the pandemic, when those kids locked up for months, but still with masks and restrictions (for example, in the boarding school and in the institute where the protagonist lives and receives class), began to take fresh wind. And there, the fatal accident of the father, played by Honoré himself, sharpens his state of excitement: the natural one, due to age; and the one caused, both by the pandemic (although it is never expressly mentioned) and by the family tragedy.

His ideas frighten him and what he thinks seems to him a threat. Youthful angst. Omens of death. Explosions of pain and rage. And Honoré shows it from a double aspect: the realistic and the poetic. Following a line that starts from Ingmar Bergman, especially in The Communicants, and ends in François Truffaut, mainly in The Two Englishwomen and Love, Honoré places in front of the camera his protagonist creature, 17 years old, with a nondescript background of photographic studio. The boy looks at the target and theorizes, explains and expels what happens to him with successive parliaments of elaborate writing. A spoken and looked diary that could be that of an entire generation. And next to the boy, in an incomprehensible life that overflows, a grieving mother who treats him as the child he is no longer, and a complicated older brother who treats him as the man he is not yet.

A film that experiments with forms, narration and tone (ranging from one extreme to the other, from ecstasy to collapse, with adolescent singularity), Dialogando con la vida is far from the automatic pilot of certain European social cinema, repetitive and self-indulgent with its methods of realistic everyday life with a hammer. Honoré plays with music, with Yoshihiro Hanno's soundtrack, enveloping, sharp, sometimes dissonant, and with a song from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (Electricity), key to his enthusiasm. And it is ambitious like few others, because it adds a political touch with a conversation around François Hollande, Éric Zemmour and the far right, and a couple of sequences of daring homosexual explicit sex, which fit perfectly into a set very of its time, ours.

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Read the film reviews

The young man's process of self-destruction, with spiritual doubts and quick, furtive sex dates, is the vivid portrait of confusion. His and that of so many others. Bitter work about a dark time, in which intensity and fear go hand in hand, Dialogando con la vida is atrocious, but, at the same time, hopeful. Disconcerting? Of course, how can a lacerating account of youthful disorientation not be disconcerting?

Dialoguing with life

Address: Christophe Honoré.

Interpreters: Paul Kircher, Vincent Lacoste, Juliette Binoche, Wilfried Capet.

Genre: drama. France, 2022.

Duration: 122 minutes.

Premiere: May 12.

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