by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Anne Berest, Anna Mouglalis, Rebecca Zlotowski
Intro:
Fragments of a Life Loved might be one of the most comprehensive documents on the nature of love that has yet been made.
There is no definitive text on love. Hell, there are no definitive texts on just about any human experience, as it is impossible for any one person to view a subject from every possible angle. So much art has been created to try and capture its beauty, like an ocean of prisms all reflecting different points of light as it glints off the surface.
Fragments of a Life Loved, the latest documentary from Chloe Barreau, is essentially an audiovisual scrapbook of the filmmaker’s own love life over the decades, using home videos, photos, letters, and contemporary interviews with past lovers to go over… just about every possible combination and reaction that is possible concerning a relationship. Young, mature, man, woman, gay, straight, conditional/experimental, brief, prolonged, good, bad; over the course of an hour and a half, it is all on display.
It is all incredibly messy, both in the flurry of media stimulus provided by the technical components, and in the depiction of Chloe herself as well as her romantic history. After a while, all the different individuals being asked about their feelings on-camera begin to bleed together into this writhing mass of ‘past love’, and Chloe’s own characterisation through their eyes again covers all the bases that could possibly be considered. She’s aloof, she’s serious, she’s committed, she’s adulterous, she’s stable, she’s unruly, and above all else, she is in love with the idea of love.
Even with the bleeding effect present, it is interviewee Rebecca Zlotowski (a filmmaker in her own right who most recently made Other People’s Children) who ends up codifying the film’s overall tone in how she describes feeling ‘seen’ by Chloe’s love. That notion of being ‘seen’ is what ties it all together, both the act of having all these people interviewed and Chloe having all of this memorabilia at hand. An inclusion of France’s history with homophobia (because even one of the most sexually liberated cultures in the Western world still isn’t safe from the righteously nosy) adds to the notion of the need for some kind of external validation that this is indeed a) real and b) good. It rubs against the old artistic dilemma of whether art even exists unless it has a witness, with Chloe’s intoxicating nostalgia serving as a prolonged and ongoing work of art.
That might explain why Chloe feels like an observer to her own story here. Even though Fragments of a Life Loved is intrinsically personal, a sense of detachment pervades. Chloe isn’t the one conducting these interviews, and she’s always referred to in the third person. Even the handheld footage rarely shows Chloe. It’s less a portrait of herself than it is a canvas made up of the numerous her-shaped holes in other people’s memories. It takes the intensity of love and the way it can and will cling to the human mind and, through that, emphasises just how much love, all her loves, mean to Chloe in turn. It echoes works like Call Me by Your Name in its holistic approach to love over a lifetime, with each point being just as valid and representative as the next, where the most important thing is the feeling in the moment; even when reminiscing afterwards.
Fragments of a Life Loved might be one of the most comprehensive documents on the nature of love that has yet been made. At any singular point in a relationship, or even completely outside of one, there’s something to relate to and kick-start the nostalgia engines. It’s a work of artistic ego, without a doubt, but there’s a curious effort made to still make it work beyond just “hey, person I knew years ago, can I film you talking about me?”; it is objectively subjective and subjectively objective. A contradiction in all things, and yet it all means the same thing: Love… is pretty damn amazing.
