Talking about a poem in itself, judging a poem in itself has no real, precise sense. The poem is an abstraction, writing that waits, a law that only lives in the mouths of a few people,” wrote Paul Valéry in De la diction des vers.
This cinematic adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Penthesilea (1807) was intended to be as simple as possible in order to find this law.
Joyfully shot on an island in Brittany, between two sand dunes and some cliffs, in the winter light, the film focuses in particular on that moment of raw speech borne by a face in the hope of allowing the text to breathe again.