Dir: Philippe Garrel [2008]
Neglected by her husband, Carole, a well-known actress, spends most of her time alone at home. When a journalist, François, arrives to take photographs and interview her for a report, she wastes no time taking him as her lover. But for him, the passion doesn’t last. For her, desire turns to an obsession that destroys her. As he embarks on a new life with another woman, François is haunted by the spectre of Carole..
Philippe Garrel, the most melancholy of the post–New Wave masters, introduces a supernatural dea ex machina in Frontier of Dawn, a visually voluptuous, deeply felt film shot in high contrast black-and-white. Philippe’s son Louis—who also starred in the director’s magnificent opus about the May 1968 revolution in Paris, Regular Lovers (2005), essentially playing his father’s surrogate—is a photographer named François, involved in a doomed love affair with Carole, an unstable actress. Carole is soon institutionalized, but François moves on, settling down with Eve, a union that promises stability and happiness. Carole kills herself and comes back to haunt her former lover, appearing as a menacing apparition in mirrors and instructing François to join her in the realm of the undead. This wrenching dissection of a tumultuous affair shares a kinship with an earlier Philippe Garrel film, I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (1991), based on the director’s own relationship with the self-destructive German singer, Nico. Probing both the exalted highs and the miserable depths of love, Garrel assumes his rightful place among cinema’s greatest romantics.
