seventeen years old, summer, sexual initiation. Isabelle discovers sex with each other in a way that is far from engaging. She even observes herself doing it, while the body remains deaf, cold, calculating, apathetic.
So Isabelle decides to become Lea, another her who empowers her to do with herself what she wants without, perhaps, knowing it.
To prove herself, to gain but not to need, to discover herself and for fun or perhaps out of boredom and emptiness, Isabelle/Lea begins to sell herself to the highest bidder. Beautiful and very young she spends the four seasons of her seventeen years trying to figure out what to do through another identity built on the web and lived on the body.
There is no real reason this is the dismay that Ozon wants to provoke, succeeding with determination. The crisis of meaning and the attempt to search for meaning, an answer to some behaviors place the viewer in front of the question mark that has no answer. Mystery has the upper hand, some experiences cannot find reason except, often, in the lack of reason that still has a reason.
The intimate is reduced to homologation, modesty is a stranger; the inability to express one's emotionality lives the season of illiteracy, and in the face of the loss of speech, silence reigns supreme.
If "on what one cannot speak one must keep silent," said Wittgenstein, Ozon seems to adopt the philosophy of Adorno who advocated "the effort to say what one cannot speak about."
Isabelle is the embodiment of this; she does not speak, she does not say, she does not reveal why but acts and confronts the exhausting question mark: Why?
A decisive food for thought that posed by Ozon, a
provocation, a refined exercise in arousing dismay and for those who wish it, complacency.
Brady Corbet
Ferzan Ozpeteck
Lukas Vallenta Rinner
David Gordon Green
Tommaso Santambrogio
Radu Jude
