In 1988, a year after the publication of Presences of a summera novel with a fantastic flavor by Taichi Yamada, Nobuhiko Obayashi made a faithful adaptation, the horror film The disembodied. A divorced screenwriter and father met a couple strangely resembling his parents, who died 30 years earlier. However, as his enigmatic neighbor and new conquest assured him, they were malicious ghosts.
In the hands of Andrew Haigh (Lean on Pete, 45 Years), the novel by Yamada (who died at the age of 89 last November) takes a completely different turn. In fact, it is as if he continued his reflection on love begun in Weekend (2011), where two men who met in a bar got to know each other after spending a night together, to which he would have added a moving study of mourning and childhood trauma. We also find in All of Us Strangers a memorable evening in a bar where alcohol and ketamine disrupt the senses and perception of reality.
Adam (Andrew Scott), a single and lonely screenwriter, receives a visit from Harry (Paul Mescal), who lives in the same deserted tower block in the suburbs of London. Bottle in hand, the enigmatic young man would like to spend the evening with the forty-year-old, but the latter rejects his advances. Shortly after, Adam, who lost his parents in a car accident 30 years earlier, finds his father (Jaime Bell) and mother (Claire Foy), as they were at the time, in the house where he grew up. Back home, Adam then becomes closer to Harry, with whom he experiences an affair as tender as it is torrid.
Fragments of Adam’s scenario, fantasies, daydreams, recurring dreams, paranormal phenomena? Regardless of the path on which Andrew Haigh wanted to lead the viewer, it is the emotion that prevails throughout this drama where the central character seems to go through life in a somnambulistic state or as if he were a prisoner of an ambient melancholy. Having lost his parents at the start of his puberty, Adam will never know what they would have thought of their son, his career, his orientation, the painful secrets he would have hidden from them.
Throughout conversations with his father and mother, together or separately, it is their approval that the screenwriter seeks. Adam will even go so far as to want to introduce them to Harry, who is taking up more and more space in his life.
If each encounter turns out to be happy, each is also tinged with an increasingly invasive sadness that grips the heart, as if Adam had the intuition that this could be the last time he makes up for lost time with his parents. .
With irresistible hits from the 1980s, including the Pet Shop Boys version ofAlways on My Mind and the moving power ballad of Frankie Goes to Hollywood The Power of Love, Andrew Haigh highlights Adam’s nostalgia for childhood. Anyone who has lost loved ones will appreciate the delicacy and accuracy with which the filmmaker conveys the fear of forgetting their voice, their face, their perfume.
While the drama ends on an unexpected and disturbing note, Andrew Haigh leaves the viewer with his questions about his relationship to death, to the love we have for those who have passed away, as well as to the guilt we can sometimes feel like being alive. Bathed in an enveloping dreamlike atmosphere and carried by an impeccable cast, All of Us Strangers proves to be a daring illustration of the manifestations of mourning.
Indoors
Drama
All of Us Strangers (vf: Without ever knowing us)
Andrew Haigh
Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy
1:45 a.m.