TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Sport and cinema

L'Empire de la perfection

Julien Faraut
2018 - France / United Kingdom - 1h35

Screenings : wednesday 24 - 5:00 pm - Pathé - 2

Cinema lies, sport doesn't. In the early 80s, tennis player John McEnroe was copied in every school, studied from every aspect and filmed from every angle. Roland Garros 84: he brushed with perfection, and yet...

“The patronage under which L'Empire de la perfection (John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection) is placed is no small one: firstly Jean-Luc Godard in the opening (“cinema lies, not sport”), then Chris Marker (“when you watch a tennis match, you never really know what you're watching”, which echoes the famous “you never really know what you're filming” from Le fond de l'air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat)), and finally Serge Daney, quoted explicitly in a sentence that brings cinema and tennis together through a common essence, the invention of time. All these masterful figures do not, however, make Julien Faraut's film an indigestible theoretical mountain. On the contrary, the film retains an astonishing clarity, digressing with ease along its spiral form starting from John McEnroe to return to him having, in the meantime, broken down the movement, diffracted time and explored the psyche. While he is undoubtedly the subject of the film, the American star is seen less as an object of study in his own right than as an epicentre around which everything else revolves (and the layout of the Roland-Garros stadium, with its packed, open-air stands encircling the red clay court below, evokes this telluric impression of emerging directly from a crater).” (Thomas Choury; Critikat)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Mathieu Amalric
Voices : X
Cinematography : Gil de Kermadec
Editing : Julien Faraut

Production : UFO Production

French distributor : UFO