Born in 1972 in Lausanne (CH)
Lives and works in Lausanne (CH)
1999
Video, colour, sound
Durée : 14'
Year of Purchase: 2000
Most of Emmanuelle Antille’s videos are set pieces that question the nature of behavioural patterns and interpersonal relations in various social situations. The setting for Wouldn’t it be nice is a lunchtime family reunion of three generations. This is a «family film» shot with the artist’s own family members (herself included), but edited in such a way that it immediately heads off into a fictional construction involving the reuniting of two twin sisters, and their ambiguous relationship. «A relationship that no-one could quite put a name to [ … ] outside convention and cliché (it is not really about love, friendship, pain or incest)», writes Emmanuelle Antille. Right from the start of the film, the action is broken up into a quick succession of very brief shots. The camera focuses on vague half-gestures (a hand on a thigh immediately brushed aside with the back of the arm; a hand that picks up a glass and then deliberately drops it), on systematically associated gestures of attraction and repulsion (embraces). While the nature of relations among family members remains allusive, never actually stated, the violence and inappropriateness of the characters’ actions are exaggerated; their outlandish behaviour becomes ambiguous, combining uncontrollable impulses with ritual, symbolic games. The film is edited to follow several characters in parallel, alternating group scenes in which a meal is prepared, with moments when they go off to the privacy of their own rooms. The characters move back and forth between being alone and rejoining the prescriptive group. On their own, they tend to behave more impulsively: one of the girls rubs her head against the side of her bed, the twin sisters touch each other in an ambivalent caressing massage, shaping up for battle. The film alternates between longer shots (a girl undressing in her bedroom) and very short close-ups, invariably to amplified the sound of scratching, rubbing, rustling and other such noises. The shots are joined together in a kind of explosion of sound and images, like a sudden reconstitution of the simultaneity and continuity of the space-times of the different sequences. By placing the nuclear family at the focus of its members’ individual sets of impulses, Emmanuelle Antille opens up her film to Freudian interpretation, as she makes a critique of the family as a hotbed of unspoken coercion, suppressed desires and frustrations. Falling somewhere between Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, where, as a symbol of coming together and compromise, mealtimes are when impulses run wild, and Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, in which the policed group splits under the strain of what is left unsaid, Wouldn’t it be nice resists the temptation to dot and cross leaving an open-ended narrative, with the last word going to false bodily movements.
François Piron