Back To Normandy

The French documentary maker Nicolas Philibert, revisits the cast and locations for Moi Pierre Riviere, a film he worked on as assistant director with René Allio, 33 years before.

In the original film, Allio used local farmers and their families to play the key roles, while professional actors merely played supporting roles, such as lawyers, doctors, judges, etc. One of Philibert’s key roles back in 1975 was to travel around the region looking for locations and trying to persuade the locals to perform in the production.

The premise of Back To Normandy is simple - Philibert returns to the region to see what has become of these amateur actors, what they remember of the shoot and how their lives have changed since the making of the film. Three decades on, he finds many of them living in the same area but now parents and grandparents, some of them having faced tragedies or hardships, but many of them professing that their lives were somehow enriched by being a part of the movie, even if it is only as a pleasant memory. For Claude Hébert who played the title role, it truly was a life-changing experience for he became a missionary.

There were mixed reviews when this film came out, many feeling that the premise was flimsy and the resulting documentary insubstantial. I disagree. Philibert skilfully weaves together a thought-provoking film that could have been a nostalgia trip for the director but which proves to be so much more than that. It is a film that clearly demonstrates how chance events in a person’s life can inform their future.

Philibert is a deft interviewer and a clever narrator, shuttling between his own memories of 1975, the present day and the events that took place in the 19th century. He uses clips from the original film, moves from location to location, introduces historical documents, stills, images of the landscape and its livestock, interviews with the actors interspersed with the roles they played and adds a coda regarding information about what became of Allio’s film after his death.

What makes this film so effective, both emotionally and philosophically, is that Philibert has a good rapport with his subjects and takes a step back, not seeking to draw any of his own conclusions, but allowing his interviewees to reveal themselves, to speak for themselves. Reminiscences are warm and shared readily and generously. The result is a quietly powerful meditation on the resilience of the human spirit, our ability to adapt, grow and transform and how our accomplishments seem to us in retrospect.

I think this film is interesting as a documentary in itself but if it is watched in conjunction with Allio’s film it both grows in its own right and adds texture to the original film. Worth watching.