point of contact

DOSSIER 2006
The official online publication of the
Syracuse International Film Festival, Vol.3
A Point of Contact Production

Photograbber, France
Pascal Tosi, Director
(Fiction- 19 minutes)

Film Review by Phillip Novak

In broad terms, the characters here are stock figures: a termagant wife, her passive, milquetoast husband, and the angelic ingénue with whom he has fallen in love. But the work Photograbber does with these characters is anything but standard. Marcel, the husband, makes toys by hand; and he functions an artist figure. Because he has no power or control in the real world, he fashions worlds of his own in miniature where he can play out his fantasies: thus he has made a toy version of himself and one of Marie, the shop-girl ingénue. One day, while visiting Marie in her shop, he sees a new kind of camera, an instamatic, which he purchases as a present to his wife for her birthday. When he first tries the camera on his wife, however, he discovers that it has the remarkable ability to capture, to remove from reality, whatever it takes a picture of. His wife’s upper half disappears into the photo, where it/she remains alive. Marcel quickly starts appropriating the world with his camera. He sets up a gallery or theater of animated photos, with which he can amuse himself. He puts on a black sequined jacket and happily presides as emcee over his little theater world. His crowning achievement, surely, is the capturing of a fire-works display, which adds a festive air to the ongoing performance in the theater. The people Marcel has captured, however, are not happy—particularly his wife, who manages, in the film’s last scene, to get hold of the camera and turn it on Marcel, who disappears at film’s end.

What the film presents, of course, is a parable of postmodernity—that process by which contemporary reality got subsumed by representations. But Photograbber is much too interested in the technology of representation, which it uses strikingly in the production of its special effects, and it is much too whimsical, to function as an expression of anxiety about, or nostalgic lament over, the loss of the real. If there’s a cautionary tale embedded in Marcel’s experience, it has to do with Marcel’s selfish motives and his disregard for others, not with the act of representation.

In the richness of its visual texture, in its whimsy, in its focus on the relation between reality and representation, in its love of the theatrical, Photograbber reminds one of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. It is beautifully crafted, as befits a story about an artist, and visually stunning, a pleasure to watch. It is funny, fun, and clever. The actor who plays Marcel, Michel Cremedes, diminutive and doll-like himself, seems as though he could have been appropriated from the films of a much earlier epoch—a Melies short, perhaps, where the character he plays would have been right at home.