Films

«Room 212» and the space-time of love

4 reading minutes

written by Jonas Follonier · October 16, 2019 · 0 comment

Cinema Wednesdays - Jonas Follonier

With Room 212, Christophe Honoré has achieved a feat: to occupy space in a way it has never been occupied before. Unafraid of well-written dialogue and a refusal to be naturalistic, the established filmmaker delivers a theatrical tale about the duration of a marriage, carried by a casting breathtaking.

This is the story of a married couple whose daily life is turned upside down by an explicit text message. Maria (Chiara Mastroianni) is unmasked by her husband Richard (Benjamin Biolay). In her defense, Maria decides to play up her light thigh, arguing that no couple lasts long unless both spouses go off and have sex from time to time, and that sex has nothing to do with love. Yes, except that Richard has never cheated on her in twenty years of union. While he broods in the living room of their apartment, Maria grabs her things and heads off to spend the night at the hotel across the street, in a room overlooking their apartment. It's an ingenious set-up that allows Honoré to deploy his entire staging artillery, based on this spatial face-off. On a magical Parisian street, itself the stuff of fantasy.

In her room 212, referring to the article of the French Civil Code on the duty of fidelity of both spouses, Maria meets Richard, but not the forty-five-year-old man she's married to and who's sulking in the building opposite, no: the man in the hotel room is the young Richard she once loved (Vincent Lacoste). This is the next stage in Christophe Honoré's doubling operation, which is followed by the appearance in Maria's room of her then-rival, Richard's piano teacher (Camille Cottin), the appearance of all her lovers, past and present (and there are many), and of her will, personified by a Charles Aznavour look-alike (in broad strokes) (Stéphane Roger). The doubling is present in every detail of the film, with the descending of a scale on the piano without the touch of a finger, or the ordering of two glasses of whisky per person - yet another possible interpretation of this number 212.

The space-time of Now

From the very first minutes of the film, after a clandestine love scene in which the motif of doubling is already present, the sound of the song Now by Charles Aznavour. We weren't expecting to hear this cult song so soon, which was featured in the film's highly effective trailer. But Christophe Honoré always seems to find himself where he's not expected, and therefore in the right place. Not that the surprise is justified on its own; when you're dealing with a talented artist, you know it's going to be as good as the artist's ability to make sense of it. And so this song Now that one would have expected at a moment of great amorous break-up appears at the end of a simple one-night stand. A married woman's lover is still her husband, but her husband as he was, her husband as he could be or could have been, her husband as he is not.

«From now on / My heart will live under the rubble / Of this world that resembles us / And that time has devastated...» It's all there in the song. Time passing, making love pass. The dimension of time materialized in the film by the three spatial dimensions. «From now on, I'll keep my door closed».»The door, the main character of Room 212. The closed door symbolizes the discrepancies we hide from each other, the wall erected between two spouses who have become strangers to each other; the open door invites forgiveness, reconstruction and a last chance. To the hope of recapture. For love is not just conquest; it is continual reconquest.

A French neo-Hollywood

Let's talk about the actors too. True prodigies of the seventh art. Christophe Honoré's delightful dialogue seems tailor-made for them, and their talent makes us believe it. «How long have you been living on your tiptoes, darling? - I don't know anymore.» Chiara Mastroianni as maestra of embodiment; Benjamin Biolay at the height of his acting powers, which become more and more important as his career progresses, merging with his singer-songwriter's hat. The artist has also entrusted to the magazine Number that he is preparing a film in the musical comedy genre. «How did you get so convinced that only your interest mattered in life?» - A bluff Vincent Lacoste, coupled with a perfect Camille Cottin.

In the end, Room 212 is one of those films where there are so many things to say, but which, if they were really said, would spoil the pleasure of the future viewer. Go and see it, that's all I have to say. Set aside the evening so you can accompany this outing with a good meal and a good chat (with your spouse?), and digest this unprecedented cinema experience that won't leave you unmoved. Because it's a film that manages to be original, innovative and aesthetically pleasing, even though its subject matter is love and time, ancestral themes present throughout Aznavour's repertoire. And in our lives.

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com