Crau

In a stony steppe and along its edge, beings emerge like mirages.

A woman sleeping in the hushed silence of a car, a noisy factory, a music lesson, a few sun-lit branches in a shady forest. A red dragonfly in a limestone field. A sleeping house, another in ruins, a teenager sunning herself, numerous sheep. Ants. Crau takes the inventory of a place (a dry landscape under a harsh sun) that it leaves unnamed. And by not naming it, the film bolsters the disquieting impression that the pieces of this observational puzzle could well hail from the four corners of the earth. It is not really a matter of exhausting a place, as this anonymous place is far from exhausted, it could go on for hours like this, hours full of details embedded in the large empty landscapes, soothing the spectator’s gaze with a singular, gentle hypnosis. Were it not silent (but it’s full of sound, often the voice of a human or insect somewhere around, dogs barking, cars and trucks nearby), it would remind us of Pagnol. For there too, the local area is something other than itself: a dreamt-of land, an Olympus (the rare humans are filmed as giants), the dawning of a whole world. From one shot to the next, Crau wends its way in defiance of any hierarchy, melting all realms (human, plant, animal and mineral) into one, drawing the portrait of an unknown land, yet one where no detail is unfamiliar to us.

Jérôme Momcilovic