Vers Mathilde (Towards Mathilde)

Director: Claire Denis

Main Cast: Mathilde Monnier

Year: 2005

            I know nothing about dancing (sorry, it should be called as CHOREOGRAPHY), I cannot find any story inside Vers Mathilde, I don¡¦t know what the director Claire Denis is doing (even she also says she dosen¡¦t know what she is doing inside the film), so what I am writing it down is largely from my sensual perception rather than reception.

            This is a film about Mathilder Monnier preparing a choreography performance. I suppose choreography should be a better word, because the movement of herself and he students hardly regarded as poetic, aesthetic or rhythmic under mutual understanding. The appearance, gesture and movement of choreographer Mathilder Monnie tend to be asexual. Her performance is kind of dynamic mutation with surrounding vacuum and discontinuous, scattered music notes (some of them by PJ Harvey). For Claire Denis, her camera is shooting with the dynamics and unnamable performance of Mathilder Monnier. Gradually, Claire Denis seem grasp her pace and conversate with her movements by camera, meanwhile, I have a feeling that Claire Denis and Mathilder Monnier is the same people on two different bodies.

           In the epilogue, it is on show, a choreographer (maybe Mathilder Monnier, maybe her student, maybe Claire Denis!!) dances on the stage with a screen projecting how she is dancing now. It is an extremely amazing setting, as frightening and mesmerizing as Ingmar Bergman¡¦s Persona, Claire and Mathidler are just like Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson. At beginning of that scene, it has a split camera diving two sides showing different angles and different times of the dancing; by and by two split cameras merge into one; then music ends, dancer keeps on dancing for a while, camera only shoots on her feet and the screen projecting dancing shadow on the stage, finally, dancers move outward from the projected screen on herself. Can you tell how crazy Mathilder Monnier and Claire Denis are? Of cause you can¡¦t, it is absolutely unnamable, just like the whole film is, requiring your perception rather than reception.

            Coincidentally, I¡¦ve just browsed the essay about Virginia Woolf¡¦s To the Lighthouse:

¡§Yet, the truth about this thing is that there¡¦s no truth nor art to it. Nor is there anything else that one could ascribe to the individual persona that was Virginia Woolf. Who?¡¨

In this cinematic journey of Claire Denis's Towards Mathilde, can you tell who is going towards Mathilde Monnier? And who is Mathilde Monnier anyway?

Obscure Rating: 6/10

http://imdb.com/title/tt0457517/