Bérénice (1983) Raoul Ruiz

Free adaptation of the play Bérénice by Racine. With Anne Alvaro, Jean Badin, Franck Oger. It all starts with a joke, a typically Ruizian challenge: to make filmed theater, and why not, while we’re at it, all of Racine in Super 8. Then, the order from the Avignon festival, the staging and the recording from one of the major pieces of the classical repertoire, Bérénice. Raoul Ruiz pays particular attention to the prosody of Racine’s text. Titus, the emperor of Rome “who passionately loved Berenice and who, it was believed, had even promised to marry her“, recites his alexandrines in the old-fashioned, conventional style of classical theater. As for those around him, they must speak like contemporary French politicians, according to the filmmaker’s wishes. Bérénice, played by Anne Alvaro, recites in an impressionistic manner, modulating her silences between each verse, like a sleepwalker (“I loved: I wanted to be loved”). But through its elegant black and white and its most original technical device, Bérénice is above all a ghost film. The Queen of Palestine carries her hallucinated pain (“Alas, I thought I was loved”) in a vast house filled with shadows; the ungrateful Titus, consoled in advance by the specters of his realpolitik, has become a simple reflection. Carnal, inconsolable but sovereign, Anne Alvaro galvanizes the singular adaptation of the most beautiful of tragedies – a presence that Agnès Jaoui will remember years later in The Taste of Others. (Gabriela Trujillo)