Looking at You Looking at Me

A love story between mother and son through time, autism, and the screen. Since Clovis lost speech at the age of two, Nathalie has tried to find reciprocity with his more-than-verbal means of expression. Combining 30 years of recordings, past and present, “Looking” is an ode to their labors of care.

When Clovis stopped talking at age 2, his mother Nathalie decided not to try and replace language but rather search for other paths to understanding. She looked for spaces to reach Clovis without forcing him onto her own ground. And it is through images that they find a mutual understanding. Through others’ images: all kinds of media, pieces that Clovis selects and plays in a loop. Also, images of themselves: recordings of Clovis and Nathalie made during attempts to place a camera here and there, to play, rewind an excerpt, images of themselves played again and again. Catching moments when attention is focussed, catching others when it wanders: an attention that Max Bowens seems to have applied over the three years that he was filming Nathalie and Clovis. His images interweave with the recordings and different media used and archived by Nathalie and used by Clovis. Looking at You Looking at Me also advances in repetitions, variations, loops or cuts and invents a language of gestures, rhythms and lights on screen – screens that become a place where closeness is created. A mother and son look at each other looking at each other, finding each other, touching each other. The film watches them looking at each other and tracks its own obsession in the time jumps with a genuinely sensitive determination to watch a mother and her child loving and changing together.

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar