Vernier is a great ironic observer. After a workshop with students at the Geneva University of Art and Design, the director went into the swiss night and filmed the conversations of a rich and extravagant youth, in a portrait of vanity and ostentation.
—
Empty time, young time, champagne flows and the conversations come out as light lines of coke that disappear in the laughter of young friends who gather in Geneva. To boast is a natural figure that feeds the tone and ‘’to have” is just a consequence to enjoy. Chic and select, they swing in their golden cages surrendered to the fruition game. The night is theirs. (Carlota Gonçalves)
Sophia Antipolis is a technopole on the French Riviera, a place where dreams should come true. But fear and despair lurk beneath the surface. Under a deceitful sun, five lives map out the haunting story of a young woman.
Two twin towers rise in the outskirts of Paris between the daily rush of thousands of cars and people driving in highways. At the top, two girls from opposite sides of Europe meet in rooms and hallways that carry the names of mythological gods. “Mercuriales” is a magical tale on the European economic system, the ruins of its political history, and the dreams of people – real or mythical – who live in it.)
Andorre is shown as a shopping mall in the middle of mountains making dazzling promises of modern happiness.
If there is a perfect ground between documentary and fiction, in which a film grows in stable equilibrium, Vigil Vernier found it innately. The strangeness of the routine of two strippers in a bar in Orleans mixed with the equally bizarre annual festivities in honor of Joan of Arc. Both girls understand each other. At night they are a fiction of themselves, during the day they plunge in the narration of the life of another woman, extending it to theirs. An environment not too far from Rohmer’s romantic surgery. At first we are nervous, we await the shock, but the spontaneity of colors and movements, dialogues, makes these events, however distant they may be, seem as natural as our own routine. (M. M.)
