Taking place in a single location, the confines of a Park in the middle of summer, Damien Manivel's Le Parc is an enigmatic curiosity, a fable-like exploration of human emotion that follows two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who are meeting up for a first date in the park. Le Parc is a near masterclass in the economics of filmmaking, a seemingly simplistic story which taps into the profound effect emotion can have on the overall psyche of an individual, delivering a dreamlike fable full of introspection and fascinating insights throughout this simple story of boy meets girl. Early on, Manivel's Le Parc is tender and alive in its simplicity, exhibiting the hesitant fragility of these two characters who are feeling each other out, each radiating in their innocence, infectious in their curiosity towards each other as the promise of connection and/or companionship is very much a possibility. The film's tone shifts quickly in the second half of the film, with the revelation that the boy himself already has a significant other delivering a striking blow to the girl, whose psyche full of optimism and exuberance finds itself dashed under the weight of this betrayal. Through this impressionistic fable, Damien Manivel exhibits how fleeting life's truly joyous moments can be due to our emotional complexities, demonstrating the relativity of emotion in time and space, and how the weight of emotion, rather positive or negative, impacts our perceptions of time. Minimalist in design, Le Parc's impressionistic cinematography gives the film a very dreamlike, fantastical feel, the visual design supplementing the internal emotions of these characters, through both the promise of love and the eventual threat of isolation and loneliness which is felt through this girl's introspective character arc. The static photography gives the film a tranquil quality, with the sun-drenched green fields, and luscious vegetation of the park beautifully exhibiting the joyous nature of these two character's interaction, one where the promise of connection and possibility of companionship is expressed visually. When these two character's share a kiss in a secluded area of the park, Damien Manivel's brilliant but simple decision to use a basic shot-reverse-shot of their faces, similar to the work of Eugene Green, pays off in spades, beautifully exhibiting the exuberance and shared intimacy of both these characters, who at least for a moment, are one. The back half of the film, where the girl finds her promising romance shattered, takes place between dusk and darkness, the pitch black night expressing the emotions of a character whose illusion of romance and the possibility of love is shattered by the revelations that this boy himself has a girlfriend. Tonally what was once vibrant and alive, is replaced with the piercing silence of solitude, with the open fields of the park, the expanding space of the visual design feeling far more prevalent as it evokes the feelings of loneliness and isolation being felt from our protagonist. A dreamlike experience, Damien Manivel's Le Parc is a minimalist exploration of love, companionship, and human emotion, a film that through a simple date in the park, which starts out promising but ends poorly, manages to tap into they dynamic nature of emotion, and how its relativity to circumstance often shapes the world in how we experience it.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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