08/02/2023 - The feature debut by Alice Zeniter and Benoît Volnais promises an engaging and topical character study, but leaves the viewer puzzled due to a lack of clarity in form and tone

Before We Collapse [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the first feature by acclaimed French author and stage director Alice Zeniter, co-writing and co-directing with fellow debutant Benoît Volnais, which has premiered in IFFR's Big Screen Competition, owes a lot in terms of its form to the former's primary profession. But literary and theatrical influences do not help it achieve clarity in form and tone, which seriously undermines the effect of the otherwise engaging and topical drama.

Tristan (Niels Schneider) is a 35-year-old campaign manager for left-wing candidate Naïma (Myriem Akheddiou) at the upcoming legislative elections. It is a scorching June in Paris, and DoP Jean-Louis Vialard captures the atmosphere with blinding sunlight, focusing on the drops of sweat on characters' bodies and the grey haze of smog that the TV in the background says has reached hazardous levels.

These circumstances will make Tristan's problem unbearable, rendering him half-crazed and barely functional. And said problem is that he has received a positive pregnancy test, sent anonymously by mail. Maybe this wouldn't have shaken him so much if his mother hadn't died from a rare neurological disease that he might have inherited, but for which he never had a test done to know for sure. Now under pressure from his stressful work and the fact that his dementia-addled father is nearing his death in a nursing home, he starts to frantically investigate.

He is assisted by his roommate, the lively and politically outspoken literature teacher Fanny (Ariane Labed), as they go through the list of possible senders. There are four, including a campaign intern, a nurse at his father's place of residence, a girl drunkenly picked up in a bar and his old girlfriend Pablo (Souheila Yacoub), who now lives in one of France's numerous organic, self-sustained agricultural communes. Circumstances conspire – or Tristan brings it on himself with his confused idea of priorities – to make their visit to the commune coincide with Naïma's key rally and his father's death.

Split into chapters and a couple of sub-headings, the film employs a woman's voice-over which describes the background of the characters' relationships and Tristan's childhood. In the central segment, entitled "Tristan", the point of view shifts to his own, with his internal monologue.

While the story was so far mainly concerned with Tristan's self-pity and inability to deal with his issues, it trails off as he and Fanny arrive at the commune, and is completely abandoned for an extended political discussion. During dinner, Fanny and Pablo, who have a history of falling out, get into an intellectual conflict rehashing left-wing bourgeois talking points about capitalism, the environment and revolution, in a scene that more than overstays its welcome.

Though these topics are present in the film and very much connected to what we thought was the central theme, they don't quite gel with it. The co-directors did their due diligence in setting up the scene, but this is one too many a shift in the picture's tone. We are not sure what we are supposed to feel for Tristan and the rest of the characters owing to the film's muddled approach to emotions and moods: sometimes it feels tragically serious and at other times almost satirical.

In certain scenes, Sophie Trudeau's sentimental piano-and-strings score seems to be used in an ironic key, but in others, it goes way over the top, leaving the viewer puzzled and, more importantly, feeling very little. As a character study of Tristan, the film works to an extent, but this aspect barely manages to take up any more of the viewer's perception than its other themes, important in their own right but dealt with in a redundant way.

Before We Collapse is a co-production by France's Elzévir Films, France 2 Cinema and Paragon, and Pyramide International handles the international sales.