EA3

In September 2008, at the crack of dawn, a small film crew met in a house in Provence to give substance to a memory. During his childhood, whilst watching television, Vincent Dieutre heard Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine—created by Berthe Bovy with the Comédie française in 1930. He set out to find what so troubled him at the time in this “firestorm of words” and shot a “clandestine, feverish film” as an exercise in admiration as night falls. Jacques Nolot plays the role originally intended for an actress. The main plot remains unchanged: after a few unsuccessful attempts, a man reaches the person he intends to speak with on their (mobile) phone and starts a patchy garbled conversation. He makes a final declaration of love that is disrupted by technical problems. Nolot’s performance ends with the reading of a letter that the filmmaker addresses to Cocteau’s rights-holders, who were disturbed by the “queerisation” of the work, in which he recalls Cocteau’s tendency to “twist works” and that this play is “not a story of a man, or a woman, but a pure story of love.”

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