I got my first camera a chunky Voightlander - when I was 18. I used to develop and print roles of black and white film all night long in the garden shed. It took a while to get it right and so this small but significant section of life is depicted in washed out, contrastless photos that speak of something vague and ungraspable - the present as something already past - and more subtly, of failure and despair.
Garrel must have been onto this effect I've never seen it used before for that's exactly what we have here. The blurry, washed-out images are amazingly effective in conjuring up the gentle emotions of almost-ordinary moments. It's like picking random moments from a particular epoch of your life from ancient tapes, and watching thinking "God yes, that's how it was", when even the pattern that a lamp made on the wall, or the ordinary creak of a door in a seedy room brings it all back.
There's little coherent narrative or dialogue. A brooding, intense fellow is making a film at times he sees things as if through the camera lens; his girlfriend has a fond attraction to a friend's child; he lapses into drug-induced derangement (stark, wordless hospital scenes of electric shock treatment); she loses her mother and lapses into drugs herself. Clearly these are autobiographical moments from Garrel's life and might be worthless but for the style with which they are represented.
We hear there is only one print of this in the world in Garrel's possession, and it is rarely shown. It was, however, released for a while on DVD in Japan and I was lucky enough to come across one of those (no English subtitles). It's a special experience that is worth watching and rewatching as you go along, just as you often have to stop and re-read lines of poetry.
This is the vacuity of the past put on film; certain experiences that were so intensely real at the time that they became fictional even in the living of them, and, now remote, can only be grasped in underexposed, badly developed memories.
