Pandore
Director Virgil Vernier
Countries France
Duration 35 min
Synopsis
Initiated with Flics then Commissariat (FID 2009), Virgil Vernier continues here his enterprise for exploring our passions. Obvious with his persistence as observer and moralist, the following epigraph borrowed from La Bruyère: “The city is shared in different societies, which are like so many little republics, with their laws, their uses, their jargon, and their words for laughing.” In the program of this sentence follows a still picture: outside nighttime, entrance of a Parisian nightclub. A “physionomiste” is at work. He sorts, withdraws behind the silence of a verdict, argues sometimes, distributes, always generous, verdicts. God is not dead; he is God. Here we have cut up a little, very little, theatre of passions. The stake, pathetic, decisive: in or out. From where? From one evening Paradise. On this threshold, the camera also persists and records the procession of requests. Each one goes there with his strategy for convincing the all-mighty: posture, snobbery, humor, meanness, spite, aggressiveness, wounded pride. Like in a famous and similar sequence from Scorsese’s After Hours, it is Kafka that we think of, and likewise returned to his comedy, which is to say in his real violence that is descriptive and merciless, in direct drive with the arbitrary of the application of the law. In the image of these low-reliefs with the circumference of certain ancient sarcophagi, Pandore lets unfold a little crowd of night revelers who nudge each other forward in search of election.
Initiated with Flics then Commissariat (FID 2009), Virgil Vernier continues here his enterprise for exploring our passions. Obvious with his persistence as observer and moralist, the following epigraph borrowed from La Bruyère: “The city is shared in different societies, which are like so many little republics, with their laws, their uses, their jargon, and their words for laughing.” In the program of this sentence follows a still picture: outside nighttime, entrance of a Parisian nightclub. A “physionomiste” is at work. He sorts, withdraws behind the silence of a verdict, argues sometimes, distributes, always generous, verdicts. God is not dead; he is God. Here we have cut up a little, very little, theatre of passions. The stake, pathetic, decisive: in or out. From where? From one evening Paradise. On this threshold, the camera also persists and records the procession of requests. Each one goes there with his strategy for convincing the all-mighty: posture, snobbery, humor, meanness, spite, aggressiveness, wounded pride. Like in a famous and similar sequence from Scorsese’s After Hours, it is Kafka that we think of, and likewise returned to his comedy, which is to say in his real violence that is descriptive and merciless, in direct drive with the arbitrary of the application of the law. In the image of these low-reliefs with the circumference of certain ancient sarcophagi, Pandore lets unfold a little crowd of night revelers who nudge each other forward in search of election.