ČLÁNKY

#recenze

Until death separates us

Let’s open the door on a film about love. Love to a beloved one who could go through life, death, and beyond but it’s also about a bittersweet end, the hardness of letting go, and about fragile new beginnings. Love could destroy you but it’s never late to find reconciliation and start again, even if you just arrived in paradise like Jérôme.

Goodbye Jérôme! is an 8-minute-long animated graduation film from three co-directors Chloé Farr, Gabrielle Selnet, and Adam Sillard. The film made, in 2021, mixes 2D digital animation with drawing on paper and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year. After that the film was screened at many festivals globally and also collected prizes at festivals like the Berlinale, Anima, and Fantoche Animation Film Festival. Finally an online premiere was at the end of September.

The short film is a strong voice of the upcoming generation of directors, animators, and artists from Gobelins in Paris, France. The patroness of the class 2021 was Marjane Satrapi and like every graduation film from there, Goodbye Jérôme! was a collective piece of high quality animation. Teamwork plays a major role in the studies there. If you see the individual creations of each director side by side you can see three distinct but strong artistic voices and in Goodbye Jérôme! they found a way to connect all their styles in a masterful surreal way. Gabrille Selnet said in an interview for Sundance that the film was a collective experiment that surprised all of them.

The story is about Jérôme who journeys through paradise to find his wife Maryline. In the course of his search, he sinks into a surreal and colourful world in which no one seems to be able to help him. Paradise and its habitants offer him a lot but not what he came for. He doesn’t want flowers, hot-dogs, music, or tasteful drinks, he wants just to desperately find his greatest love. In the end he is successful but he will pay a price for his devotion. Marylin in the one year without Jérôme found a happy new afterlife without him. Their marriage oath is nulled after her death, she rejects his love and he is literally smashed to pieces. His next more painful journey begins when he has to find his inner peace.

The trio of directors were strongly inspired by the aesthetics of the 1970s and the cartoon is reminiscent of films like Yellow Submarine directed by George Dunning in 1968. These aesthetics are mostly visible in animation and also on the colourful backgrounds made in ink and watercolours. The fantasy of all authors was freedom, with no rules in the creation of how the paradise should look like. The main character walks, jumps, and rides through dreamy spaces such as the magical forest, the ocean with coral reef, the banquet, and the art gallery which he isn’t able to enjoy because he is running through to find his lost wife Marylin. When I watched the film I was strongly reminded of the film by Vincent Ward What Dreams May Come from 1998 with Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra where the main character Chris Nielsen embarks on an afterlife adventure to reunite with his beloved wife Annie who has killed herself out of grief over the loss of him and their children. In this film, Nielsen also creates his own paradise from scratch and it has ending-less opportunities.

Jérôme’s character needed to be really simple from the beginning because he has to stand out on those all wild backgrounds. A bold line around his body creates a close space for his existence and it's visible already in early developments. This outer line keeps its strong look even though Jérôme is shifting his proportions during his journey from heaven. An important supporting character in the film are the ants which appear every time something new begins. They open the gate to paradise for Jérôme and they also start process of his reborn after his love disappointment and with their help he could start a new chapter of his paradise after-life. The scene where they come to the little pieces which are left from Jérôme is very strong and viewers can vividly project their own failures of love connected with the painful feelings.

The film also contains an abstract water-colour part in which music has its peak. The rich picture is supplemented by great sound from Nadège Feyrit and music made by Anna Cordonnier and Amandine Robillard. The sound also supports a kind humor which flows through the whole film. It starts with the echo of an answering machine in the endless paradise and ends with the sound of porcelain walking of Jérôme pasted together from pieces of his previous self.

I’m not surprised that two from the director trio - Chloé Farr and Gabrielle Selnet continue their studies at La Poudrière at Valace, a school focused on directing for animation films. I had the opportunity to see at the end of year screening their new one-minute shorts from first years there and both of them were really strong films. Chloé Farr keeps watercolours, bold outlines of characters, and vivid colours in Ketchup (2022) about a juicy summer day at the pool where the main character Olive has to deal with a situation where children torturing a frog while she’s enjoying her delicious cheeseburger. Gabrielle Selnet made an atmospheric black and white short Nicotine Baby (2022) about craving for a cigarette, where the desire for a smoke is stronger than fear from a short tent–car journey in the middle of the night. I have to say that you should keep those three in your eye because soon or later they will definitely come up again with something extraordinary.

In the end what I appreciate about Goodbye Jérôme! too is also the lightness of the film. I saw many films in short competitions this year, really good ones about hard themes which need to be shared and talked about, but between them, it’s also great when one colourful short film lifts you up and fills you with a warm feeling of happiness. Together with Kate Jessop and Gala Frecon we awarded this film at Anibar 2022 at Peja, Kosovo as the best student film with these words: Film dazzled us with its playful mix of surreal humour and visual style. It showcased a strong direction of animation, sound and story, a highly competent accomplishment from the team that invites you to be part of Jérôme s journey again and again.

And I have to say that from June I followed Jérôme in his journey more than three times.