In a dark room, devoid of any decorative element, a woman lies, suspended above the ground by ropes which hinder her movements.
Around her, hands are busy, those of a man, who tie, cross, tighten the strings in slow and applied gestures, to create complex patterns. The scene is violent, almost intolerable at first glance. Then, the camera, applied, non-intrusive, suggests elements of softness, even tenderness. It is because the model emanates a total abandonment, a confidence, a deep feeling of peace, while she offers herself, whole, to the experience.
The actress Larissa Corriveau underwent intensive training in Shibari – this Japanese art linked to bondage – before lending herself to the game in front of the camera. She wanted to do justice to art, to go beyond fetishist clichés and to understand the appeasement it brought to her character.
A spirit of kindness
This spirit of benevolence, respect and intelligence for others hovers over the entirety of Denis Côté’s new film, A summer like thisin which three women with problematic and complex relationships with sexuality are invited to isolate themselves for 26 days in a house in the forest.
Accompanied by Octavia (Anne Ratte-Polle), researcher in psychiatry, and Sami (Samir Guesmi), social worker, Léonie (Larissa Corriveau), Geisha (Aude Mathieu) and Eugénie (Laure Giappiconi) reveal themselves, confront each other, bond friendship, reminisce and dream. They exist, in short, in their wounds and their contradictions, their fantasies and their impulses, sublimated by the effort of introspection that withdrawal and confinement require.
The new film by Denis Côté, in which three women with problematic and complex relationships with sexuality are invited to isolate themselves for 26 days in a house in the forest. They reveal themselves, confront each other, befriend each other, reminisce and dream
Body language
Everything, from sexuality to confessions, through realizations, conversations and innocuous activities, arises from this plunge into the intimacy of the characters, revealed sometimes in fleeting or inviting glances immortalized by close-ups, sometimes in long dithyrambs that expose their traumas, their vision of the world, their memories.
The three dazzling actresses offer a physical play tinged with interiority, which relies more on body language than on intentions justified by a context.
At Denis Côté, the women are naked, they masturbate, shave, offer themselves, seduce; their body as a mirror of the human behind, caressed by the gaze of an artist who tries to shed his relationship to eroticization, aestheticization, desire. The self-restriction mechanism is perceptible, and is reflected in the viewer.
For the latter, the experience is both sensory and cerebral, disrupted by the absence of codes or Manichaeism. Depending on the vision of each, sexuality shocks or moves, presents itself as a prison or a tool towards freedom and self-affirmation.
The filmmaker leaves room for raw emotion, the one that upsets enough to induce a stop, a questioning of a restrictive vision of conjugality which forces women to conform to a very precise framework.
A form of sovereignty
There is something of the tale in this film in which the trajectory as the resolution are incidental.
The three protagonists exist only in the present moment, in a freedom, an organic and liberating nudity of body and mind, which allows them to claim a certain form of sovereignty, and to exist beyond judgment.