Hold Me Tight

Mathieu Amalric’s penetrating Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), based on the play Je Reviens De Loin by Claudine Galéa, begins cryptically with a woman, Clarisse (Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Best Performance winner Vicky Krieps for Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, screening in this year’s New York Film Festival), turning over polaroids of her family life displayed on a table in a kind of makeshift memory game. “I’m sick of being little,” says one of her two children. Daughter Lucie (Juliette Benveniste) wants a piano, son Paul (Aurèle Grzesik) wants a treehouse. What could her husband Marc (Arieh Worthalter) want?

Shot by (César Award winner for Xavier Giannoli’s Lost Illusions) Christophe Beaucarne (Amalric’s The Blue Room and Lumière winner for Barbara) the film is tinged in shades of coral - from the tablecloth to Clarisse’s fluffy sweater, to the rust and the car. You could also call it the colours of blood, depending on how much water has been mixed in. Clarisse talks to a girlfriend (Aurélia Petit) at a gas station. It was cold and early in the morning when she drove off. At home, her family does family things and Lucie wears her mother’s dressing gown. On the fridge is the shopping list: bread, wine, cheese, eggs, artichokes.

Mathieu Amalric’s momentous direction and the phenomenal performance by Vicky Krieps bestow upon Hold Me Tight the sensorial acuteness to abduct us straight to the place where, providentially or not, poignant life decisions are being forged and the creations of new realities begin when the world around seems to collapse.

How much in our life really happens in our heads? We shape the past and order it in neatly stacked drawers or folders of narrative, speckled with colourful meaning. There is no immunity to anticipating the future with the help of the past and the dreams at night with their fresh openings into what is possible. Even the present is always filtered through a dotted veil of mourning, a grid or sieve of experience. Mostly we are alone in this endeavour and sometimes love breaks through. The dead are with us like sand carried home from the beach, not like ice melted off distant glaciers. Clarisse knows this in her bones.

“We have gained reality and lost a dream” is how Robert Musil put it in The Man Without Qualities and the struggle between science and sorcery remains complicated. Clarisse, found in incessant motion, displays the struggle between what is wanted, what is there, and what is no longer there.

A woman in a bar has drinks. For a second I did not recognise her as Clarisse. She is elsewhere and explains in German in a harbour a boat and a rope to a group of tourists. She scolds a father (Sylvain Micard) about how he treats his kid (Siméon Micard). In a marvellous feat of cross-cutting, we see her husband Marc getting rid of her stuff on the bathroom shelves.

Clarisse puts her head in the fish ice at the market and collapses while her son screams at home “You threw away mom! You threw her perfume away!” With the woman alone in her new life and the family without her, past and present are not what they seem. The house was built in 1722 and the car is from 1978, but grief, pain, and invention are not so easy to pin down as they hold us tight. We all live with ghosts and those who leave may not have left at all.

There is a trompe l'oeil effect to various encounters and a strong will at work. This is the portrait of a lady with a Leerstelle, an aperture that produces a surplus. The flight from what is commonly agreed upon as reality is more prominent now than ever after the past two and a half years have shown everybody how fragile the construct of a global normal really is.

What happens when you try to take control of the narrative of your life is one of the many puzzle questions Hold Me Tight (a highlight of the 74th Cannes Film Festival and New York’s 27th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema) raises.