I wonder what would be the state of a filmmaker Christophe Honore If only I had been born in Latvia, Uruguay or Korea instead of being born in France. As a family member, I couldn’t work together on “Cahiers du Cinema”, I couldn’t attend parts of the Cannes Film Festival every year. A militant homosexual director who is not well known in our country outside the festival circle, I would like to summarize his stylistic features in a few lines: planning by leaps and bounds, his fondness for shooting with a handheld camera, and the writing of scripts that tend to twist the cycle somehow, even if they don’t get anywhere.
All of this is fulfilled to the letter in “Le Lycéen”, the original title of “Dialogue with Life”, which presents us with the troubles of a young adolescent who passed away with more sadness than glory at the San Sebastian Festival. His father was in a car accident and he doesn’t know how to grieve. It is played by Juliette Binoche, whose parents have always been influential, and Christophe Honoré herself. The casting error occurs when the lead role of his son is given to Paul Kirchen, who is turned into a copy of Tadzio in “Death in Venice.” The highly detailed film is narrated by an adolescent looking at the camera and suffers from numerous repetitions and twists that delight the audience.
“Dialogue with Life” falls under the sub-genre of movies that I define as “families who never go hungry, but shout at each other from the first sequence to the last sequence, humiliate each other and fight until they get tired”. Cases living in the countryside or the capital city where each of the characters live show that housing problems do not affect them at all. On top of that, they fill the cinemas to see French cinema.