Irène (2009) dir. Alain Cavalier

Film director Alain Cavalier remembers his first wife, Irène, who died in a car accident in 1972, by visiting their old haunts and rereading his diaries of the time. Autobiographical essay, a video diary shot and recorded by the filmmaker, using little more than his imagination and the happenstance and flow of the everyday, finally layering in a lifetime of memories. There s a door opening on the dead s realm and Cavalier has been given the key to see and let us see someone and something from it. The way is not without danger, the vehicle to get there is cinema, here in its lightest and most discrete version how you would be allowed to get there otherwise , the language is the one of Orfeus: metaphor, image, voice, seducing voice, reiterative voice and the result is called Irène. Probably a central film in Cavalier s world offering for example another insight into Ce répondeur ne prend pas de message.