Wrought through with Arnaud Desplechin’s signature romantic and lyric tension, its tracking shots of Roubaix accompanied by the music from Vertigo and its frames deliberately distant, as if we were eavesdropping, L’aimée mingles narratives like no other. In the foreground, the filmmaker stages his relationship to his family and its departed through the family home, about to be emptied, and a portrait of a beloved woman, his paternal grandmother, who died too young for even her own son, Desplechin’s father, to have a single direct memory of her. Yet in the film’s opening, Desplechin, ever the methodical narrator, clearly tells us about another late beloved, this one much more recent, but whose face already eludes him. He never says her name, and never will, but her presence floats throughout the film, between the lines, colouring how we take in other narrative threads taken from various writings left by his late grandmother. While he discusses these sparse snippets of daily life with his father, trying to cobble together a story that is at least partially his own, it becomes clear that this game of memory, supported only by a patchwork of second-hand memories and impressions gleaned from photos and letters, crafts only a blurry portrait of the departed woman and the life of her loved ones—a portrait that still offers some comfort for the living. In the end, is it so important to be sure of our memories?

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer