JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS), living cannot wait – Review

Can grace flow through the veins of a film? Faced with JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS), difficult not to see a small miracle of cinema. So close to the heart, so close to our lives, Joachim Trier's fifth film is a superb explosion that lacks neither beauty nor inspiration. Nor of a solar actress with a devastating charm, Renate Reinsve, interpretation prize at Cannes this year. We can now affirm it: the Norwegian filmmaker would therefore have descended from the heavens to bring us an essential message; everything is going to be fine because life cannot wait. Heartbreak, inevitable.

The spleen, Joachim Trier had given it to us. Already 10 years ago, he strolled us through the streets of Oslo, alongside his will-o'-the-wisp, in search of a past time that could no longer be caught up. It was beautiful like a depression. Because in the tragedy of his end, we managed to find peace. The appeasement in the accuracy of wandering; and this twilight for a dawn. All that remained for the filmmaker was to dive into these new lights. His ray of sunshine, he will find in Julie, an incandescent character, undecided but flamboyant, filmed like a tempest of charm and instability. JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is a bit like a poem by Keats. It's beautiful, it's solar, it's luminous, it's passionate, it's fiery and full of butterflies. We can easily imagine Trier presenting his Julie to us as if he were offering us a gift: “Look, here he is; I hold it out to you. My film here alive. This film is a heartbeat. It beats, it breathes and opens its arms to us. How can I refuse such a sweet embrace? We simply do not refuse it.

We remember: in the silence of his last plans, Oslo, August 31 saw a succession of lamentations signed The White Birch: “Through the wilting trees / I could only see the dark”. The lamentations did not erase the doubts. But enjoyment took precedence over tears: JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is light after darkness. It's the joy of living that swims in this spleen "Trierien". Christopher Cross will give the "la" to Julie's hips: "I'm on the run / No time to sleep / I've got to ride / Ride like the wind / To be free again. Julie, it's her, it's this woman fleeing forward, it's this hurricane that carries away everything in its path. The foreground sculpts the icon: a profile, a central silhouette, a burnt cigarette, a breath, a panorama of Olso, a tranquillity, a look off-screen. Yes, Julie is already trying to get out of the box. But she remains there, undecided about the direction to take. The film will follow known paths, but never in tourist mode. So much the better, because orientation is not Julie's forte: medicine, psychology, photography, literature, she seeks her place in society without really finding it. And his 20 years disappear in the wind: welcome to the age – always thankless – where choices have to be made.

Reprise ? In this concentrate of hyper-dynamic life that acts as a prologue, Trier seems to reconnect with the movement that already opened his first feature Nouvelle Donne: fleeting thoughts, an intrusive voice-over, a gentle madness, a search for freedom, a leap towards something; towards dreams, successes and failures. The film then explodes in our face; so much so that he sucks us in with his breath. The uppercut has only just begun. The program will be structured but dissipated, constructed but unstable, fictitious but authentic: JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is the opus of a new beginning, the full circle of an "Oslo trilogy" which had as its climax a solar - and melancholy – August 31.

JULIE is a mosaic of moments stolen from time, a chic – but not fake – collage of episodes that come together to tell the quest for a modern-day heroine; an impulsive one who rushes into life like Frances Ha (aka Greta Gerwig) rushed through the streets of New York on Bowie. We also think of Eva's wandering in August by Jonas Trueba. Like in a Rohmer film, Julie is looking for her green ray; that is to say of itself, of this ray which, in contact with a retina, allows one to see clearly in one's own feelings and those of others. Ultimately, the Holy Grail or a sight problem? No, just life moving on and time passing. And us, all we ask for is a ray of Julie to make our hearts beat.

We remember this magnificent sequence in the heart of Oslo, August 31; that of a wandering ear in a café and a comparison of some intimacies. Trier interfered in people's conversations with such delicacy that he managed to touch on something infinitely human and magnificently banal. It was there, in the words torn from everyday life, in the vulnerable looks and the little attentions that the film suddenly found relief. A succession of brushings from which the filmmaker extracted fragments of conversations, like this young woman who listed her life goals: "to make useful everyday things, to paint magnificent paintings that reflect what I am really " ; Sort can at least check that off its list. Because like Oslo, August 31, JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) contains magnificent brushstrokes leading to a canvas that could be mistaken for a mirror. The reflection is disturbingly true. Does it take a leap of faith to believe it? Perhaps. But basically, it is an act of reminiscence on our own life that Joachim Trier invites us to do. The film is thus traversed by these eternal existential questions: how do we become the person we are? And even more, who are we? What do we expect from life? Can we be fulfilled without children? Can we live without regrets? What happens to memories when the person you love is no longer there to carry them? Trier prefers perdition to answers. And it's all to his credit.

His story - composed with his lifelong companion Eskil Vogt - proves to be rigorous, structured, assured and welcomes the unpredictable in fragments, by chapters: if he summons a literary and melodramatic structure, it is also to allow vulnerability to clear a path in a classic and codified dynamic. We sometimes think of the delicate writing of Sally Rooney and the adaptation of her Normal People where hearts touched and tore each other, embraced and found each other: twelve episodes - like the twelve chapters of Julie - which told the difficulty of managing one's feelings, the vulnerability behind banality, the bewilderment and exposure of two intimacies and the fulfillment after all these pains. JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is also a marvelous setting for feelings. It's hard not to be won over by the spontaneity of the walk, the subtlety of the observation and the finesse of the description; always with the central concern of human vulnerability, regardless of gender, male or female. Richard Linklater is also never far away in this accuracy of tone and this generational portrait.

JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) also scans her time without putting her under psychoanalysis. On the contrary, it is always a matter of questioning the relationship of being to its environment; a relation always of inadequacy or inadequacy. Whether it's a famous televised debate scene where Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) gets bogged down in front of an offended host or an episode where the ecological crisis interferes within a couple, the sequences often want to be biting and light. We also think of this superb moment of seduction where we come very close to adultery without ever falling into it: far from the clichés, the game turns out to be as funny as it carries a budding passion; somewhere in this slow motion on a shared smoke, in these smells that we sniff and these intimacies that we watch until dawn. And because you have to keep the emotion intact, there's no need to say more about these fragments and these moments of high. You just have to open your eyes, let yourself be carried away and experience the film as if it were the first. Extraordinary ? On the contrary, so close to the common that it becomes extraordinary. By trying to understand the interiority of a woman who does not know what she is, Trier above all offers us a cinema of light in the darkness of human cracks. Time passes, and again, Julie runs to catch up.

JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is also putting the world on hold to run desperately after something that looks like a fantasy. The sequence marks and operates a changeover / a rupture. For a moment, we think of Cashback by Sean Ellis who also stopped time to extract a melancholy look; that of a character who saw in the "pause" a way of seeing the world, of taking stock of his life and of not missing what escapes him when the hands resume their movement: "Love is there if we wants it, coiled in beauty, hidden behind every second of life. If we never stop, we risk missing it. To stop in front of Trier's film is therefore to extract oneself from reality so as not to miss its beauty. And this, before the tone becomes more serious. Because the expression “from laughter to tears” has never been better used: thus, the second part of the film sees the drama – and a good dose of melancholy – come to infuse in the comedy, without it ever becoming heavy. In her permanent breaks in tone, JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) sweeps the tears from our faces to better accept the regrets that make us who we are. Joachim Trier knows how to look closely; in those hearts that don't show what they feel, in those looks or gestures that betray them, in those moments when dysfunction occurs, when the human doesn't follow logic, when the feeling is palpable. What we contain, Sort reveals.

And how beautiful is this cinema of experience and uncertainty. Something is triggered at first sight. More than a passing current, it's electrocution. If all eyes are on Renate Reinsve, the reason is simple: beautiful, spontaneous, just in emotion, irresistible by her smile, perfect in her nuances of acting, the actress merges with the character with remarkable ease. The role is written for her, tailor-made (after a flash and festive passage in Oslo, August 31), and her contagious energy carries us away. So endearing. So true. Then comes the amazement when we see what his face can express. It gives new meaning to the expression “crever l'screen”: is this, then, cinema in three dimensions? Trier even plays us a serenade with three actors; three superb performers who don't just play characters but seem to embody people. So close to us that we feel like we know them and share memories with them.

If Herbert Nordrum is amazing, Anders Danielsen Lie delivers a masterful and moving performance. In three “trierian” films, he will have gone through time and taken on a few fine lines without his gaze changing. The tears are still there. Especially in those moments when the actor's face crumbles to reveal a hidden fragility, a pain, a restrained emotion, a shared feeling, a confession: "I couldn't make you see how much you are wonderful. The emotion passes here by gestures, by contractions on faces, glances, brushings, frictions, crumblings. It is not for nothing that JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is above all a film of actors and actresses.

But JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is also a formally daring work that sees each face, each expression, each movement, being sublimated by the filmmaker's gaze. Kasper Tuxen thus performs miracles in photography: he captures, in 35mm, the texture of life, its grain, its delicate light and the radiance of faces. All the interiority of the characters, enveloped in a luminous aura, stands out on the film. It feels like a film by Mikhaël Hers. The photograph then gives the irresistible desire to stroll through the streets from dusk until dawn and to relive the euphoria of a night spent hoping that each moment would last forever.

Faced with this canned time, Trier deploys a precise and dynamic staging where each "gesture", however artificial it may be, manages to hit the right emotion. Whether it's an air drum solo or a look at the horizon, the filmmaker manages to find cinema in banality. Since we always live in a film in germ and it is up to us to orient our gaze. Each movement then has the effect of a caress. Everything will be fine, she tells us. Yes, hard to refuse the embrace that Joachim Trier gives us. Her movie arms are so comforting. Especially when Harry Nilsson accompanies these images to give them an all the more memorable flavor: There's nothing left to say / I'll pack up my memories then I'll walk away. Indeed, everything has been said.

Wasn't it Bertrand Tavernier – the patron saint – who claimed that cinema had taught him to love life? Another film which is added to the building: JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) or how to learn to live over our indecisions. I would even say more: faced with this epic of sentiment, the same impression arises as faced with a film by Guillaume Brac; so accurate in his understanding of life that it ends up pale in comparison. But there again, it is only a fantasy of reality where life is filmed like an eventful adventure (cinematic, literally). The important thing is to believe in it. And how not to believe when we have Joachim Trier who serves as our gaze? The formidable illusion that the film maintains is this feeling that the film speaks directly to us. So much so that it becomes almost impossible to put words to this concentrate of life. You have to feel it to be able to say something about it: a few shivers, bristling hairs, a fine line at the corner of the lips, a heart beating to the rhythm of the images.

Oslo, August 31 was already a crushing slap. So we turned the other cheek for Trier to give us a new one; a good big slap which this time has the flavor of a caress. The brain adapts to such a shock. He develops a part specially dedicated to the film, a little cocoon that one comes to pierce when the eyes become rainy and the mind cloudy. JULIE (IN 12 CHAPTERS) is a solid, exalted and delicate film that could almost act as a pacemaker for fragile little hearts. Its strength is its female character, its actress, its hurricane, its cyclone: ​​tossed about by this storm of life, the only direction to take is the breakthrough to the heart, to the crumbling, to the emotion; before release followed on Garfunkel. It's the end of the road. It is life, it's the sun. It's a hunch, it's a hope. Then the little melody starts again. And silent, when the lights come back on, we whisper to ourselves: so that's living. Or was it just cinema?

Fabian Jestine