![]() Dreams and reality overlap, poke holes in and inform one another. Yet in a film where emotional texture prevails over narrative obligation, these occasional clichés don’t produce the same tedium, in part because they coexist, indistinguishably, in the same dimension as fantasy. She lets out a guttural scream when the bodies are found and several times must be chased after or carried off by concerned bystanders when she drifts from reality. (Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman is the most egregious example, though Fatih Akin’s miserabilist revenge thriller, In the Fade, is a close runner-up, with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, while a cut above those two films, still trading in the quasi-profundity of maternal guilt.) Hold Me Tight doesn’t assume a totally different posture-Krieps performs the requisite moments of dead-inside-ness and indulges in reckless behavior because nothing matters. Amalric makes manifest Clarisse’s mind-screen, putting us on a more tenebrous, elusive path than one aimed at discovering mere causes and events.Ī few recent films have taken-in increasingly standardized, vacuous ways-the woman in mourning or otherwise shaken by trauma as a dramatic showcase explicitly tipped toward her empowerment. There are no neatly demarcated flashbacks, no clarifications as to what is real and what isn’t. ![]() Clarisse is at the center of this universe, and her efforts to quell the hurt of monumental loss-the call to “start again”-are the film’s structuring principles. Yet the film, based on a play by Claudine Galea, is also a departure from Amalric’s past work. This dynamic is announced at the start of the film: Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) gathers dozens of Polaroids and, with startling force, slaps them down on her bed while muttering “let’s start again” like a kind of a prayer-or a spell-intimating things to come. Hold Me Tight is also marked by a fascination with the encounter between reality and fantasy, and it unfolds, like The Blue Room and Barbara, as a collection of scenes plucked from memory and scattered nonchronologically, like rose petals-a poetic effect achieved by Amalric’s regular editor, François Gédigier, whose enigmatic orchestration of the events positions us as detectives searching for clues, feeling for solid ground. The Blue Room (2014), an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, sees Amalric in the throes of erotic obsession with a femme fatale played by his then-partner and cowriter Stéphanie Cléau Barbara (2017) features Jeanne Balibar, his ex-wife, as an actress preparing for the lead role in a biopic about the French chanteuse by a director played by Amalric. ![]() Or How I Got into an Argument) and Roman Polanski (2013’s Venus in Fur), Amalric has repeatedly starred in his own films opposite partners and intimate collaborators. Beyond his aggressively metatextual collaborations with filmmakers like Arnaud Desplechin (1996’s My Sex Life. Goblin-grinned actor-writer-director Amalric is no stranger to such a calculus it appears to be his point of departure as an artist. It’s no wonder, then, that so many filmmakers make nostalgia-fueled revisionist accounts of their personal lives and the historical milieus that shaped them, and, in some cases, cast themselves-and their friends and lovers-as characters in their own self-fashioned celluloid dreams. Cinema, the “art of ghosts” per Jacques Derrida, has always commingled the real and the imaginary, conjuring as it does an uncanny realm that gives shape to feelings, desires, beliefs. The text grows fuzzy it becomes something else. Like tears seeping into a printed image, the details warp and the colors swell and bleed into one another. In Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight, grief transforms. ![]() Hold Me Tight, written and directed by Mathieu Amalric, Vicky Krieps as Clarisse in Hold Me Tight.
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