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IFFR 2025 Harbour

Review: Morlaix

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- Jaime Rosales’ new film riffs on fate, romance and inevitability, musing on a love triangle laced with what-ifs

Review: Morlaix
Samuel Kircher and Aminthe Audiard in Morlaix

The first widescreen images of Jaime Rosales’ new film, Morlaix, bring us into the green Brittany countryside, the tan-grey homes in the titular town nestled comfortably between the trees and the grass. As gentle piano music by Leonor Rosales March begins to play, our nerves are calmed – but then the Spanish filmmaker pushes us into a new visual frame altogether by cutting to his teen protagonist Gwen (Aminthe Audiard) in crisp black and white as she attends the funeral of her mother. This omnipresent world-shifting is the most striking feature of Morlaix, which has just had its world premiere in IFFR’s Harbour sidebar.

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However, even this greyscale journey doesn’t last long. As soon as Gwen meets the entrancing new kid in town, Jean-Luc (Samuel Kircher) – having just moved from Paris with his luscious long, blonde hair – we’re reintroduced to the world anew with a 4:3 aspect ratio, again in colour. Gwen’s boyfriend Thomas (Alexis Keruzore) is unsettled by Gwen and Jean-Luc's immediate closeness; the latter brushes off their interactions as merely friendly, while Thomas reacts in an almost unnaturally calm manner (“Can I at least hug you one last time?”), as if Gwen’s memories of the past were simply rose-tinted. Black-and-white still photos taken on a boat trip and a camping trip with Gwen and Jean-Luc’s friends again capture the transient nature of memory: what is captured in a single image is only a snapshot of a whole, often romanticised.

When the group takes a trip to the local cinema, everything changes. Just like the opening of Rosales’ film, we again see images of Morlaix – but then, something more. The worlds of the multiple realities that the filmmaker presents to us begin to blend with the film that the teens watch, but not necessarily in any straightforward or rational – or, for that matter, mystical – way. Rosales pulls out all of the technical stops to create something that, experimentally, sometimes feels arbitrary, but otherwise very effectively reflects how Gwen’s world is constantly being reshaped, her lens on the world reorganised. What is that if not the growth of the adolescent mind?

Morlaix can, at times, feel overly staged and even bordering on cheesy – but it seems to all be part of the filmmaker’s grand plan to get one thinking in a more Brechtian way. Rosales uses the city’s distinctive architecture to his advantage, including setting the movie’s most pivotal scenes on the viaduct bridge that towers above the settlement, where Gwen is forced into making a crucial decision. With this choice, the filmmaker suggests that maybe there’s something about coming to this very town that has trapped us, for better or for worse, in a beautiful but tragic cycle of reminiscence and nostalgia.

When a grown-up Gwen (Mélanie Thierry) later returns to Morlaix to re-encounter the city, the writer-director thrusts us again into the film’s early black-and-white world, as if to conclude with one final jab at reality and linear thinking. Morlaix brings us out of our binary intellectualising: it’s not necessarily about the specific dualistic choice that Gwen made on the bridge that day. Maybe life is better lived through the realm of possibilities that are presented, rather than forcing ourselves to pick just one.

Morlaix is a French-Spanish film staged by Iwaso Films and Fresdeval Films, and co-produced with Les Productions Balthazar. Iwaso Films has also taken on the film’s world sales.

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