I recently rewatched Dédales and was reminded of my youth, my early life with L. and my discovery, with her, of the Meuse region where I was to spend a few years.
Of our life, made up of wandering through wretched villages and flea markets, black-and-white films, deep forests, military cemeteries and trenches.
The feeling of loneliness, emptiness and idleness that weighed on me. It was like missing out on life in this dead countryside, this murdered countryside, where nothing happened and would never happen again. Whose inhabitants seemed haggard and as lonely, as alienated, as powerless as the city dwellers.
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Last night, then, I saw Dédales again.
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In one scene, a police officer accompanies the psychiatrist on a tour of the dilapidated farmhouse where Claude's character grew up. We see them wandering through a network of old cellars with thick stone walls. Everything is dirty and messy. Everything is old. Everything – the walls, the farm tools, the objects lying around – seems abandoned and decaying.
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But, I don't know why, in a split second, without verbalizing it, I imagined that instead of discovering perfectly empty places, this shrink and this cop were stumbling across squatters; a cross between irascible country folk and protesting hippies from the 70s; men, women, children, living together, many of them, in this network of cellars; like a kind of miniature village, full of life and activity. As if in a secret, clandestine refuge from the misfortunes of the times.
I imagined and hoped for the unexpected and unhoped-for discovery of life, and of a community, in a place where, as everywhere today, we can only expect solitude and death.