Director’s Statement

INTENTIONS

I have always been fascinated by the faculty of certain
people to live in lies and denial: following a
comfortable/reassuring routine, looking for the advertising
happiness, and one day fi nding oneself in
the middle of emptiness, with the fear of life and
without the understanding of what is happening.
To understand would mean to accept: accepting to
recognize that we may have made a mistake, accepting
to take the risk to change, to go to the unknown.
This is often too hard: fear is there, each day,
like a loyal friend, to hold us and prevent us from
acting. Therefore many people resolve to a kind of
social schizophrenic behaviour that consists in alternating
between a type of auto suggested self-satisfaction
and the non-assumed desire to leave everything
and go, take a train for somewhere, a fl ight
for elsewhere. Those fantasies lead them nowhere
else than in the nothingness, a kind of space that
gives vertigo and moves them closer to death.
And what do people do when they have vertigo? They
move away from the void and take refuge in their cocoon:
their comfortable apartment with well defi ned
features and a “wonderful” partner. They convince
themselves that everything is fi ne, that they have
all they need to be happy. They conceive a child,
as a child brings meaning to life. And the lie can go
on, but wears them down a little bit more each day.

The Saviour is the story of a man who wants to escape
but whose lies can’t save him anymore: a man
who in a single day will be haunted by his inner anguishes,
extreme fears from which he will try to escape,
only to land in a harder reality: the emptiness.
To avoid sinking, this man will have to react, therefore
leave the control seat. This fi lm illustrates at
which point denial and control can drive a human
being to his own loss: in the best case, to a slow
and discrete social death, in the worse case, if the
dissonance is violent, to an implosion, madness.
The story of Paul, the story of Manuel, it’s the story
of my parents, of my grandparents, of my brother,
and more particularly the story of a friend whom I
recently lost. He was an « advisor » in the real estate
business. He had managed to convince himself that
he had fi nally arrived, which was true in a certain way:
his wife was pregnant and his offi ce was operating at
full capacity. But at the same time, he didn’t understand
his life anymore, asking himself what he was
doing with a wife who he had never loved, in a job
that he had never enjoyed. Paul’s wife is the wife of
this lost friend, a loving wife who held her man with
her love but who also dreamt secretly that he told her
the truth, as hard at it could be: that he did not love
her, that both of them lived lies. This story has left
its marks on me and I wanted to tell it, to transmit it,
as Manuel does in the fi lm. It’s a sad story, probably;
frequent, certainly, but it is defi nitely universal.

At best a trigger happens, a trigger that forces one
to open ones eyes and hear the truth. Then it becomes
possible to look at life with the innocence
and openness of a child and to regain access to the
pure sensations that life off ers us: the pain, but also
the beauty of life. The trigger, in the case of Paul,
is the old story of Manuel, a story that he off ers to
Paul for his birthday, a story with which Paul has
every chance to identify himself with, projecting his
own life onto the story. Despite its terrible consequences,
Manuel’s birthday gift is motivated out
of kindness, almost in a fatherly way. Through the
message of that Stranger and through the story
of Manuel, this fi lm recalls the importance of the
principle of transmission, a principle that is getting
more and more lost nowadays. The principle of
transmission belongs to the essence of fi lm itself.
The fi lm progresses diff erently between the sound
(the story told by Manuel) and the pictures (the mental
projections of Paul, listening to this story). Indeed,
Paul appropriates Manuel’s story, mixes it with
elements of his own life, reintegrating his feelings,
his mental images, his desire to go: the train that
leaves without him, the old plane that will never fly
again. Thus what is seen does not always correspond
to what is being heard. The fi lm visually integrates all
the moments of emptiness of Paul, those moments
where he contemplates time’s going (the drops of
water that fall from the tap one after the other, like
the signs of the depression he is on the brink of).

The Saviour is definitely a film that questions the
meaning of life and reminds of the existentialist
philosophers. Through the story of Manuel, Paul is
confronted to his own loneliness, to his incapacity to
act, to this chronical fear of living. He lives the same
malaise as the anti-hero of the french fi lm from
Georges Perec. His inner fl oating is the same, but
Paul lives in another context: unlike the lost student
of the 70’s, Paul is a man of the year 2012, a man who
doesn’t have the right to fl oat, otherwise he would
be annihilated. Paul lives in a society where the individual
must act, must succeed, no matter how and
why. He is in this process of cognitive dissonance,
which is underlined in the fi lm by the gap between
what is told and what is showed, even if we discover
later that this dissonance was the result of the
system of the fi lm: the projection of a man (Paul)
in the personal story of another man (Manuel).