A village in Corsica, in the summer. A piece of the life of its inhabitants, between the games of the youngest, the love affairs of the teenagers and the considerations of the elders. The heat of the season, in the middle of August, also heats up tensions, which threaten to overflow.
In a village square, a few people vegetate in the shade, sitting on the church steps, chatting with local accents and expressions. In this cliché image of Mediterranean torpor, we already sense a slight quack. Their brief conversation takes crazy turns and before the summer nonchalance talk ends with a laugh, we manage to feel there is a nervous side that runs through them, like a negative thought that has passed through and crossed our mind. However, no shadow seems to hover over this paradise-resembling Corsican village. Discreet and elegant, the frames show the countryside’s magnetic placidity, as well as the interior scenes, where even the smallest window open to a tree has something moving and magical about it. Pascal Tagnati manages to expose this underlying tension without ever showing any real violence and without loading his writing with easy shortcuts. I Comete is a film where nervousness is not translated into outbursts but by the relevance of a particularly strong point of view. Each scene is filmed from afar (which gives us a feeling of strange dizziness), and yet it is obvious that this story is told from within. Tagnati found an unusual but ideal distance to translate this community’s poisoned ambivalence and to reveal with unquiet finesse the violent mysteries that lie behind our daily lives. (Mickäel Gaspar)
