LE PARADIS

Alain Cavalier is fascinated by the idea of paradise, and finds it on Earth in the hidden beauties of everyday life. Filmed when “love is acute,” full of light, tenderness and pleasure, Le Paradis is a love letter to reality, to the beauty of the people and things Cavalier films, to the minor miracles of creation and the tenderness of memories. Somewhere between Portraits and Le filmeur, the Bible and The Odyssey, the director achieves such simplicity in cinema as to seem magical, refining intelligence into a core of pure grace. In the process he keeps cutting slyly against the grain of today’s imperatives: serenity instead of spectacle, tenderness instead of cynicism, age instead of youth, lightness without emptiness. We want to keep on hearing that soft, muttered voice in which wonderment and enthusiasm seem endlessly renewed thanks to a small camera. Rarely have we seen a filmmaker who seems both pacified and lucid; we are reminded of the latest works of Ozu, and their serenity in the face of the world’s fragility. A film that encapsulates its maker’s work, but also a path, a renewal, a springtime.