Terminus for you

Terminus for you, by Nicolas Rey, takes us on a strange journey. That of passengers in the Paris metro. They use a moving railway which takes them from one platform to another, from one line to another and from one destination to the next. What do we actually see ? The thick grain of the black and white film composes very pictorial images. Geometric shapes come and go. The faces of people come into view and then flit away. Glimpses of words, titles torn from posters, are interspersed between these fleeting encounters. This playfully introduces different chapters.
　　Love, solitude, couples, etc. The highly polished soundtrack artfully introduces other elements. You have to listen carefully to appreciate the subtle details, like the faces which emerge from the flames blown by a fire-eater. Thus, the soundtrack evokes a variety of atmospheres: that of fairground, of a circus, and the lazy waters of a river flowing between its banks — the Seine no doubt — setting the pace and commenting, like the posters, on the endless stream of passengers. The filmmaker ingeniously presents people according to affinities: mocking young girls in a hurry, tired old couples… This is a real comédie humaine presented to us — in a few fragments and a small number of shots. Then, a few minutes from the end, the cinematic process reaches the outermost limit and the images disintegrate. The film itself seems to decompose and the faces only leave their final impression on the canvas. Painful spectres, during three minutes, follow one another before giving way to a last joke played by the author. This short visual essay, on the borderline between the documentary — he seizes an everyday situation — and avant-garde film — to which he pays a tribute — defies, with irrepressible joy, any narrow classification. It freely combines painting, photography and cinema and reveals a passion for reality and a love of humanity to which the filmmaker has already accustomed us.