Once again

Over the course of a weekend, a filmmaking couple attempts to blend into a community of uniform collectors. In this world of historical reenactment, where the lightness of role-playing collides with the weight of the memories it awakens, the game becomes increasingly unsettling.

Skander Mestiri’s second film ventures into territory vaguely similar to that of his Ivre de Soul (Cinéma du Réel 2021), which was the record of several days immersed in the changing rooms of an amateur rugby club in the Drôme region. Here, once again, we are in a closed and ephemeral world, shaped by masculine, militaristic values, questions of sides and honour, training, and an overriding camaraderie. And, again, more than anything else, this is the record of a game because, beneath the seriousness with which Rebelote’s characters spend two days reconstructing the battles and folklore of the Second World War, they seem above all like children playing with toy soldiers. ‘It’s not political!’ one man in uniform reassures his group, as he raises a toast in the makeshift bar. Well, actually, in this reactionary collectors’ fairground, it kind of is. One woman collector – a tall, stern-looking blonde – says that she prefers to act on the SS side because, at least in the German army, women were able to fight. Granted, politics is not the subject of the film, whose gaze is deliberately guileless amid fireworks and swing tunes. And, clearly, politics is not the subject of this costume party, either, where Allies and Nazis share sausages and chips, and whose comical incongruity Rebelote captures symmetrically, with a childlike curiosity.

Jérôme Momcilovic