Le Soldat

One of the special, most precious aspects of the cinema of Claire Denis is the way it inscribes the passing of time through the bodies of her actors. Alex Descas, Béatrice Dalle, Grégoire Colin, Mati Diop, Vincent Lindon, Juliette Binoche … we have fondly watched them grow older and change from film to film. Michel Subor (1935–2022) is a special case, because his first appearance in a Denis film (BEAU TRAVAIL, 1999) signalled back almost 40 years, to his central, youthful role in Jean-Luc Godard’s LE PETIT SOLDAT (1960).
Both films are, each in their own way, about political confusion, about feeling lost and displaced in the midst of a complex, ambiguous situation. Denis asked Subor, in his “comeback” to the screen, to re-perform a particular, haunting gesture from Godard’s film: standing before a mirror, covering his face with his eyes and then whisking them away, in order to imagine what it is “to come to recognise the sound of your own voice, the shape of your own face.” In her Viennale trailer, Denis juxtaposes these two images – across time, history, life. In the intense, quickening, jolting editing we detect another homage: to Godard himself, who passed away on 13 September. (Adrian Martin, Viennale Catalogue 2022)