Alliance Française 34th French Film Festival 2023 🎥 Janice Tong's 3rd Filmic Postcard - ON THE WANDERING PATHS (Denis Imbert, France, 2023)

 

Pierre (Jean Dujardin) with the beautiful
Mont Saint Michel in the backdrop.

Perhaps it is true that we all encounter moments when we realise our life has been formed through meandering paths rather than that structured road we’ve, at some point, imagined during our childhood. And sometimes, when you’re down such a path, it’s easy for others to think of you as ‘lost’, just like the moment when Pierre (played with subtlety and grace by Jean Dujardin) went to purchase some cheese at an isolated farmhouse towards the beginning of his trek. The young woman who had moved there from Montpellier was hospitable, and asked whether he needed fresh water or even if he wanted a roof over his head for the night, sharing with him that most people who ‘find’ her place were usually lost. Pierre answers with a smile, “I’m not lost”. No, he is not; and neither is she for that matter, her desire to converse, you suspect, is probably because she is in want of company after long absences of human connection. 

 

For Pierre, he has deliberately chosen these wandering paths; to cut across a landscape as peasants centuries before him had done – this idea of marking your way with the help of a map and nothing else – is idyllic but hard work physically. The relationship Pierre has with walking is both a pure and simple act, but also sacred: walking is the blood which fuels his body, it nourishes his mind to make him whole again; walking is psychological, and to walk across France after his ‘fall’ (both metaphoric and literal), his only way to find salvation.

This is a beautiful film, rich in thought and meditative spirit; the differing landscapes, all scenic, belonging to nature. We get a shared view of all this from a solitary man journeying through its canvas.  All is not lost to the audience nor in the story-telling. In flashbacks to earlier moments, we got to know a Pierre who was actually ‘lost’, lost in his Edenic paradise of excess and hedonism – he was the ‘bad boy travelling through the night of Paris’. His life was no different to any of his friends: drinking, picking up girls at a book signing, going out, socialising and carrying out silly antics that all seemed innocent. The actual event of the fall is almost irrelevant, except for the fact that it brought him to this journey; and a new realisation.

 

Chance meeting with a fellow walker
Dylan (Dylan Robert)

It is true what the young man, Dylan (Dylan Robert), another lone hiker Pierre met along the 0..way, said – that you need to dare – to really have that daring spirit to do long trips. But it’s more than that, I think one has to have a strong will, that will of constant refusal; to resist the kindness of strangers, to prove that other people’s judgement or advice is in fact incorrect against your own determination; to have that desire to constantly be on the move – moving through space, time, friendships, chance encounters, the scenic view, the beauty of the land, the sorrows of those who still occupy these lost lands; whose bounty has been forgotten by the rest of the world. 

 

Based on the book Sur les chemins noir by Syvlain Tesson. Sylvain was no stranger to the long walk; he is an écrivain-voyageur, a travelling writer – he walks, travels and writes during these trips, of thoughts that shape and become part of his experience. A trained geographer with a degree in geopolitics; one of his first walks was to cross the Himalayas on foot from Bhutan to Tajikistan, 5,000 km over a period of 5 months; documented in his book La Marche dans le ciel: 5000 km à pied à travers l'Himalaya in 1997; amongst others, a 6 months journey across Siberian wilderness to India. Sous l'étoile de la liberté. Six mille kilomètres à travers l'Eurasie sauvage | Under the star of liberty. Six thousand kilometres across the Eurasian wild. So, this 1,300 km journey across France should be easy by comparison, right?

Sylvain Tesson (right) and Jean Dujardin (left)

 

This walk was what he called the “diagonal of the void”, his promise to traverse France “par sa diagonale du vide”. Whilst I was at first unsure about this ‘name’ or description that was referenced in a short dialogue in the film; I remembered it, because it sounded striking and must mean something important to Tesson. Taken literally, it describes a vacant or barren area across France, and Tesson’s desire to cut through it diagonally. This is pretty much what the journey has come to be, starting at the border near Italy in Mercantour right through to the Cotentin Peninsula in the north – these axes (as in routes) appeared to Tesson as true works of art on the 1/25,000 leaves of the IGN maps. The diagonal route he took is not through known hiking trails or small asphalt roads, but is hidden in forgotten paths, forest edges and rural tracks.

 

But truly, these “dark paths”, chemins noir, that he undertook are not actual paths; but are taken in the mind, as well as in nature, in the open, as a way to escape the digital world of enterprise and commerce where you are constantly subjected to a pattern of belonging. Tesson talked about these dark paths in a brilliant piece in Le Figaro and how these paths have led others to monasteries where soup is served at a fixed hour, and yet still others to an isolated station on the border of a desert. So, sur les chemins noir is both a journey of exile and a journey to freedom.

 

It’s difficult to disconnect Sylvain Tesson with the on screen character of Pierre. Clearly, there are enormous differences; but having caught Tesson and Vincent Munier’s trek into the Tibetan wilderness at the AFFF last year in The Velvet Queen, and having read some of Tesson’s writing; from time to time, I found myself looking for Tesson in Dujardin’s Pierre. Perhaps this was a mistake. Because, just like the ‘fall’, it is inconsequential how that happened or what caused it. Just know that the event caused Tesson to be in an induced coma for 2 months. During 4 weeks of those he had partial amnesia; and due to the fracture in his skull, half his face was paralysed and he lost his ability to close his eyes, rib fragments lodged into his heart and reduced his lung capacity, and epilepsy to boot.  In the film he noted that he “aged 50 years in 8 metres”. 

Flashback to the hospital bed with Pierre's 
sister (Izïa Higelin)

 

This journey was his way to recovery; setting off a year after his fall, although much too early by the reckoning of doctors and friends. The chemins noir sought in the diagonale du vide was what healed him. Walking: a low intensity victory over a few kilometres, kept him alive. In the film, you see much of the pain in the initial stages of the walk; his writing, on the other hand, was more immense than the 1,300 km of the journey. Take this as an example: “Dans le ciel, un nuage prend la forme d’un visage aimé. Ces copeaux, tombés de la roue du temps, sont jetés dans le carnet de notes. De l’harmonisation de ces instantanés jaillira une géographie de l’instant.” For him, this expanse that is contained in the geography of the moment, are marked with some areas still lived and toiled by landowners who have been forgotten by the world, desolate, sometimes ruined, these landscapes at the heart of the void was for Tesson, the true essence of the eternal heritage of France.

 

The beauty of the film lies in the fluency of Tesson’s word-thoughts. That was able to be built up in a captivating and alluring narrative by writer Diastème; with original music by Wouter Dewit (I actually saw someone trying to Shazam a particularly wonderful piano piece during the film), and finely directed by Denis Imbert. Perhaps the star of the film, besides Dujardin, were the people in the heart of this land who gave the film its light and shade. I particularly loved the scene when a monk asked Pierre, who was gazing at a rudimentarily carved but absolutely exquisite stone relief, “Are you sensitive to the spirituality of living stones?” “I am” replied Pierre, and the monk said, “I knew when I came here three years ago and looked at the stone, that I would spend the rest of my life here”.

Finally, Pierre reaches the sea of his destination at Cotentin.

 

The Alliance Française French Film Festival is currently on in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth from now until 5th April; and in other states until the 23rd April.