21/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Vincent Dieutre offers up an elegiac essay on a European from the last century in the pandemic-ridden “Big Nowhere” of Los Angeles

Devotees of the essay film form will find a prime exponent in Vincent Dieutre’s elegy – or, more rightly, lament – on the city of Los Angeles and what it has become, if indeed it ever was. Premiering in the Forum section of the 73^rd Berlin International Film Festival, This Is the End [+see also:
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“Literature has been lost in scandalous, commercial excess; cinema in the desire for catastrophe. Only shared poetry, the free, nervous speech of the Lounge – such a tiny minority activity – seems to me to give a real-time account of lived experience.” In the middle of the pandemic, French filmmaker Vincent Dieutre (or at least his autofictive characterisation) Facebook-meets an old lover from 40 years back and flies to Los Angeles for a passionate reunion in a city that has proven quite invigorating – or it did once upon a time. But Dieutre’s LA is a far cry from the one we saw in his countryman Jacques Demy’s marvellously happening 1968 version of Model Shop. Snakes and doomsday evangelists seem to have replaced the angels, and Dieutre himself prefers the epithet “The Big Nowhere” – spoken not without a hint of fascination.

Dieutre’s “essay” is divided into four intertwining parts. There’s the reunion with Dean, the lover, curiously expressed through GIF-like loops of affectionate caresses; there are long drives through the city, accompanied by the director’s reflections on the state of things; there are reoccurring quotes from philosopher Bruce Bégout’s Los Angeles, Capitale du XXe siècle (read by Eva Truffaut, the daughter of François), a book bearing its own nickname of the city, “Helldorado”; then there’s that oasis of lived experience referred to earlier – The End Poetry Lounge at the Jaxx Theatre in East Hollywood. Here, Dieutre the Gaul places his own village of indomitables, holding out… Here, a colourful group, among them Jean-Marc Barr, Elina Löwensohn and Kate Moran, perform work by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Claudia Rankin and Jim Morrison (who, of course, provides the film’s title).

By far the best part are the drives through the city, capturing the milieu, movement and mankind through that clear and bleak cinematic gaze of some Europeans but almost no American, and providing Dieutre with some insights that, at times, outshine the poetry of the Lounge (“Los Angeles seems to move forward like its cartoon characters, who keep walking towards a carefree life without realising the void under their feet”). Self-deprecatingly, he concludes that, here, “No one cares about my pretentious filmmaker’s indignation, my regrets, the old Europe that I carry around like relics.” Firmly seated inside his trusty Ford Mustang, his eye becomes somewhat akin to that of the viewer in the cinema, in front of the big picture. By the looks of things, he’s still there, driving, watching, concluding, “My tired world is no better after all” – spoken not without a hint of relief.

This Is the End is a French production staged by La Huit Production, Fotogram and ARTE France – La Lucarne.