Out of all of the emotions and states of being, grief is perhaps one of the most challenging to articulate and replicate clearly on-screen. For those of us who've experienced profound loss in our lives, there are various ways of navigating that feeling. However, most people will understand the dark, suffocating cloud that seems to hover over them due to that loss. Often times, it can feel like it will always be there.
In her gorgeously quiet and powerful film, L'Autre (The Other), French filmmaker Charlotte Dauphin follows Marie (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), a talented ballerina who become despondent and lost following the sudden death of her beloved father (Jean-Louis Martinelli). Unable to continue on with her life as she knew it, Marie leaves the dance world behind and begins to isolate herself from the life she once knew.
Unable to cope with his absence, Marie insists on leaving her father's apartment exactly as he left it, desperate to connect with him through memories and the words he left behind. However, life has a funny way of tilting and shifting us when we least expect it. An unexpected photo shoot with a photographer named Paul (James Thierree) ignites something within Marie that she assumed died with her father. It continues to call to her even as she burrows further into her depressive state.
L'Autre isn't some revolutionary story that we've never seen before. However, the way that Dauphin chooses to unveil the narrative on the screen is what makes it so fascinating. Without stuffing the plot full of overbearing and robust dialogue, the director gives her actors room to breathe. It's Berges-Frisbey's devastating looks and silences as Marie, set against a quiet Paris cast in grey, that sets the tone here. It allows the audience to fully connect with Marie's pain.
The pain that drives Marie is also carefully unfurled. Though her choices are sometimes eye-raising, we understand quite clearly why she creates the dream world that she forms around her. It's a state of being where she can still lean on her father, discovering aspects of his life that she never knew existed. Through her mental state becomes increasingly more fragile at some points in the film, it was refreshing in some ways to see Marie lean into it.
So often, women, in particular, are asked to put on a brave face and to press forward in life as if everything is OK. Her father's death nearly breaks Marie, and instead of fighting against that, she allows herself to lean into that feeling for as long as she needs to. As she begins to connect with Paul on a deeper level, warring against two versions of herself, who she is, and who she might become, the film starts to fill with color.
In addition to L'Autre being an eloquently told story, it offers something to the viewer something that very few films on the subject have failed to provide in the past, the ability to sit in the sheer awfulness of death on their own terms. After all, the loss of a loved one is one of the most painful aspects of being human. We should all be allowed our anguish, no matter how dark and grey it might look.
L'Autre is currently being shown at film festivals.