Les histoires vraies

Lucien Monot films his father. What begins as an ordinary documentary portrait turns out to be an exquisite tangram of stories and appearances. Who is Claude Monot? In about twenty minutes that the short film lasts, we see different facets of this mature man, which could either represent his real life or a fiction woven by his son, through which he would like to bring out the “authentic” character. With lightnessandmaintainingacalculatedambivalence not to distinguish the real experience from the recreated one - except in a single, painful scene - Monot constructs the leitmotif that presides over his subsequent medium-length film: the mutual dependence between experience and invention. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH