With his 4th film, Luc Moullet tried out co-directing with his companion Antonietta Pizzorno. Together, they decided to tell the story of the painful sexual experience they were going through at the time, evidently caused by the disruption of the recent women’s liberation movement, which carried all the way to their bed.

Their desire in this film is to reconstitute this moment of crisis, while maintaining sovereignty over their personal experiences. Accordingly, Pizzorno directed the sequences where she was alone without him, and Moullet did the same. The two collaborated for scenes where they shared the screen, Moullet blurring the lines of this filmed-at-home autofiction in his choice to play himself. As for Pizzorno, she chose to bring a third party into this lovers’ dialogue by asking a friend, Marie-Christine Questerbert, to play her role.

This triangular duo is revealed at the film’s end, as the filmmakers were unable to agree on an ending. Its final sequences play in succession and superposition, or simply cancel one another out, formally reproducing the film’s central conflict. In the city as on screen, in sex as in artistic creation, agreements seem to be compromised…

Lysa Heurtier Manzanares
Filmmaker

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