COUPLE REGARDS POSITIONS

“A two-way mirror. Water and fire. Water extinguishes fire, and fire boils away water. There are many difficulties preventing them from understanding one another. They can only marry when one of the two disappears, and yet they are inexorably drawn to one another, they need one another in order to exist. ’Couple/Regards/Positions (le mariage de l’eau avec le feu)’ forms an essay of alchemical cinema. Two figures – one man and one woman – play at watching each other, fighting each other, attacking and almost mutilating one another in an attempt to communicate and come together. Each look; each position, each of their actions is ritual and symbolic. The film is staged in a minimalist setting, featuring only geometric forms and objects – circles, squares, triangles – suspended in the air and placed on the ground. Metaphorical, abstract and visual, this is a film about black and about white (and filmed in black and white), about emptiness and completion, about the impossible reconciliation of opposites: more and less, hot and cold, high and low, sound and silence, dark and light. Water and fire. Originally conceived of as a collage, the film makes use of the associations and analogies evoked by simple and elemental items, the language of dreams, which it plays with and questions. Beyond the magic of the images, the sado-masochism of some scenes and the esotericism of the connections drawn, ’Couple/Regards/Positions (le mariage de l’eau avec le feu)’ is a film about solitude; suffering and love.” (www.borislehman.be, translated at Argos)