Synopsis
A first-person foray into the disorienting realm between reason and sensation, Peter Mettler’s Scissere is an incorrigibly inventive first feature film. It deploys a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of optical effects, in rendering the experiences of a mental patient wandering outside institutional confines for the first time in many years. Wide-eyed and frightened, the central figure, Bruno Scissere, imagines himself inside the sensibilities of three people he randomly spots at a bus station: a young mother, a heroin addict and an entomologist.
A word from Tënk
In this first full-length film from Peter Mettler, we’re struck by the radicality of his gaze and his unending inventiveness with regard to form. By choosing to follow a young heroin addict as he leaves the hospital, the Canadian filmmaker plunges us into his impossible return from exile into a hostile and chaotic urban landscape.
Criss-crossing between solitudes in a desolate Toronto landscape, his film is a whirlwind of emotions and feelings, where our sometimes-indispensable confusion only adds to its poetry and compelling strangeness.
His rhythmic and non-linear approach to the film’s editing, progressing through dissonance, diversion and free association, which, jazz-like, builds a complex and inspiring piece whose daring still awes us nearly 40 years after its release.
Terence Chotard
Filmmaker
