In His Own Image (“À son image”), shown at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, explores violence from a distance despite its protagonist living a life immersed in it. Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo) is a photographer from Corsica. She’s not directly part of the Corsican nationalist movement but many close to her are. We will follow her life from taking photos for the local paper, to war zone photojournalism, to leaving it all behind for wedding photography.
Before we get to follow her life, she dies. The movie more or less begins with her drunkenly crashing her car off the side of the road. Sometimes knowing a character’s ultimate fate makes us not care about everything that led up to it. Here it immediately helps make Antonia a real person in death, and all the people in her life we see at her funeral. We don’t know them yet but they will show up throughout.
Director Thierry de Peretti plays the priest in this scene, Antonia’s godfather. His eyes look like they’ve seen too much. They contrast with the living Antonia’s, her driving force is to see and capture the world. The sombreness and death soon gives way to a packed concert, Antonia and her friends crammed in among wall to wall people drinking. One of these friends pukes his guts out, but can only smile and say it’s been the best night of his life.
Antonia gets involved with a man who’s part of nationalist group. There’s a standoff at a hotel where people are killed. We are only told they are killed, not shown. Other than Antonia’s body, we don’t witness death directly yet. A kidnapping scene done wordlessly is genuinely terrifying. A more veteran reporter at Antonia’s paper tells her “We’ll go to a murder.” It’s still at arms length.
Her photography creates distance and brings us closer into her perspective. As she photographs her boyfriend shirtless we’re brought in to ogle him along with her. That push-pull mirrors their story. He’s sent to prison in Paris then doesn’t say a word to her at his return home party. He finally does at the end of the night but we’ll be sent away again. She will consciously do something to break them apart while he’s gone.
When that is over, she leaves for Vukovar to take pictures of the conflict there. She follows soldiers with other embedded reporters. Those soldiers round up some men and tell the reporters to leave. She hears the gunshots in the distance as she walks away. She thinks about it while lying in bed, noting she couldn’t even sell one photo. “Awareness of what’s out of frame, vile modesty. So many ways to be obscene.”
She returns home to her central point of disgust. A nationalist group announces that it has killed one of its own members in what they call “preventative self-defence”. The people hearing this announcement stand up and clap.
The nationalist groups are shown wearing balaklavas at various points to disguise their identity. We get to see their faces though, and Antonia’s family can quickly see her younger brother under one of the masks. Antonia’s ex assures her that her brother was just recruited for the photo op, a show of strength.
Near the end, in maybe the film’s only scene directly showing a killing, a maskless man walks up and shoots someone sitting at a table. It happens suddenly and quickly and is shown from far away. The man gets into a getaway car but we recognize his face. He’s a friend. He was at and will be at Antonia’s funeral.
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