With "Violent Days", a film about the origins of rock fans, Lucile Chaufour delivers a superb first feature film that flirts with ease with the boundaries between fiction and documentary.
A Wurlitzer launches " Rock Around the Clock, "the Cadillac of gleaming chrome backpack girls whose dresses blossom petals in every dance step, bewitched by the swaying of the King ... A youth in search of movement, energy, happiness and carelessness ... End of the fifties, the American myth is at its peak ... Marylin rivals Jane Mansfield ... Everything seems to be frozen in an eternal recklessness ... "Happy Days" this time wrapped in the sweet dream of an America that has never existed ... because the "rock" was originally a revolt ...
Changing times, changing places: the Wurlitzer is a distant echo, the 2000s, an apartment in the Paris suburbs, three boys and a girl hair peroxide are on the verge of a rock concert in Le Havre. The bodies of beer cans piled on the kitchen table. Behind the scenes ... We are far from happy days yet "Violent Days" tells of this idyllic fantasy of an America ... In this mythic world pulsated with music that would soon spread and have a youth eager for excitement on either side of the Atlantic .... First rock n'roll therefore not any: the origins of the King was playing before his military service in Germany, one of Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, a rock rebel, sexual ... A rock that still listen only a handful of fans called: Rockers, Teddy Boys, Rockab's Black Panthers ... Identification dress, looking for objects "Vintage" old "American" running around between two public housing. So a handful of fans, some were not yet born when their numbers idols were silent for ever, to replay the movie from a bygone era ... "My father's name was Cochran died the day I was born," sang Starshooter.
Who are they? Why the nostalgia? In his film, Chaufour Lucille tries to provide answers, and most are small working-class whites, workers, unemployed, few are immune to the world around them: it is the factory for the luckiest. So they take refuge in a "Elsewhere" fantasy ... But "Violent Days" is about more not account for these few nostalgic, the great strength of the film Lucile Chaufour is beyond this simple picture of the group and come to remind us of our own desires and also to other worlds ... The "rockers" and their passion another world that shows us Lucile Chaufour become the mirror of our own frustrations and inability at times to escape our condition, our loneliness ... "Violent Days" is a film about the imprisonment. Confinement which is embodied in the character of the peroxide-haired girl, a sublime beauty: Serena central character that opens and closes the film in two beautiful sequences. Following his characters in their journey to Le Havre, Lucile Chaufour entered his film in the tradition of "Road-movies": wandering, escape the car as a backdrop, so the movement but also the camera, gravity ...
course "Violent Days" has a close kinship with "Stranger than Paradise by Jim Jarmuch, characters almost similar: Eva and Serena, both foreign some sequences like the one where the four characters meet on the beach at Havre, which refers to that Great Lakes through the fog in "Stranger Than Paradise", the two female characters eventually take the tangent and abandon their companions while Eva will return to Europe here, Serena will melt into the ocean ... But Lucile Chaufour reads the film Jarmuch an original and intelligent, she also multiple references, "La Notte", "Stromboli," "Misfits" ... Serena to equal a Monica Vitti "Rock 'n' roll" ...
This fiction continues to be interrupted by a series of interviews with rockers. Most of these interviews are front and in opposition to the motion of fiction. This construction results in a subtle interplay between action and fictional "reality", a dialectical interplay and counterpoint is established then between the two types of images: that shows what? Who should talk about what? Fiction shows she? The interviews they comment? This device causes a suspension and we let this game take between "true" and "false" to the point of indistinctness. This dialectical game is also its strength in the choice of photography, desaturated black and white: aesthetic choice for some film, but this strange impression that black and white would do more "real." This stylization is far from futile. If this stylization asked about relations between our "real" and "fiction", as it puts the issues of the protagonists of the film that make their lives a sort of fiction. The front frames echo the interviews behind closed doors of the car. The testimonies of the interviewees also go in this direction confinement social, family (proles for the most part), confinement of the group, friends, locked in a world of illusions and that does not exist ... One of the most terrible and sequences Talking is where a Rocker, a factory direct a robotic arm and makes parts for pressing into a mold. It is this contrast between the rock of a bygone age, whose style is all outdated elegance of his despair, and this technology, high-tech image of the mold and stamps and formats ... When is it girls? Drag objects, trinkets, object of desire, dolls that are out first and then we leave home and who have little or no voice ...
Serena is the iconic image of these girls who live in this world where their dreams of little girls is to find Prince Charming. But these girls are soon to face a male environment where machismo prevails, but also frustration and violence: fighting, beer, live fast ... There misdeal and misunderstanding between men and women ... The concert sequences This beautifully illustrated three-bladed mixing energy released by the music, this world of violence and of smashes visceral where women disappear little by little ... This world finally reserved for men where women no longer find their places or very little ... The final sequence will release more circumscribed frame, just the body of Serena floating in the infinity of the ocean ... then this would be Serena Ophelia whose body would join him in the two continents, America and Europe, who finally embody the freedom that everyone expects ... Is there always something in us from Tennessee?
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