Back Before 3 p.m.

It’s a man and his place, the father in a housing estate. It’s after his death. Something has been found. Not a secret, but the underside of days, recorded with obsessive precision. A daily struggle with material life and the passing of time.

So, “a man and his place”. Or else: people in the “setting of their lives”. This expression, heard midway through Back Before 3pm, says everything. It says everything not only about the film which goes back over a father traces, but also and more broadly, about the gentle and stubborn singularity of the works of Gaël Lépingle. The set is the methodologically observed environment (always more or less the same and with the same tenderness: the peacefulness of provincial housing estates, white stucco walls, patio doors opening onto small gardens, and aperitifs with neighbours), given that the film is a documentary. At the same time, it is a theatre set, since it is also and inseparably a work of fiction. Back Before 3pm is all the more moving as this fusion of prosaicness and lyrical inspiration draws not only on the setting where the late father lived out his life, but also on the archives that he himself had obsessively compiled, noting everything down, even the slightest activity, the tiniest chore, all the banality of passing days. And because, when sifting through these nondescript annals, the film comes up with the material for a novel, a script just waiting to be performed. Equally bold and modest, what plays out here is a poignant ceremony. And a brilliant endorsement of the comment Levi-Strauss once wrote in a letter to André Breton: “the best document is also the best poem”.

Jérôme Momcilovic