Alain Cavalier’s moving, intimate film is resolutely small-scale, recorded by the director himself using a small digital camera. With a diarist’s sensibility, he revisits the components, both ecstatic and painful, of his first marriage, a relationship abruptly ended by his wife’s fatal car accident in 1972. Finding her resemblance in a Manet painting or brought to reminisce by a ruffled duvet, a heart-shaped rock or a particular journal entry, the filmmaker delineates their life together, touchingly parsing his deep love for his troubled wife. In addition to his very personal and idiosyncratic dive into the past—making “a whole film on a person vanished,” as he puts it—Cavalier explores his present-day circumstances and its limitations brought on by age and illness, including gout and an escalator accident. Steering clearly away from pity or hagiography toward its subjects, Irène is a sublime thought piece on memory and marriage.


Photographed by Alain Cavalier (85 min, Pyramide International).