Brittany

Listen to this wasted trip to Brittany with a character who stubbornly refuses to open up to the camera, underscored by the emotional narration of a parting of the ways.

This is the story of the need for a film that is thwarted by the man who would be its hero, and it is at the same time the narrative of a break-up. At the heart of Brittany lies the voice of a mermaid shipwrecked by her mourning for the person she has lost. Yann- OlivierWicht’s plan is deceptively simple. On the one hand, there is the journey of a young man, Britt, from Geneva to BRITTANY with a filmmaker who is desperately trying to film him. However, the project fails; the young man shrinks from the act. From this point of view, Britt is an emblematically smooth character and the filmmaker (Wicht), is unable to come to grips with him.The images he films are fragmentary and suffer from jerky framing and montage, showing up the basic unavailability of their model. On the other hand, a beautiful off-screen woman’s voice calls out to this man, who could be all men when they disappoint the love given to them. Britt will not let the camera in, but the woman, whose voice is moving in its fragility and yet resolute in expressing the suffering that binds her, unveils herself with sincerity.The writing of Claude-Inga Barbey, who is the author and speaker of the text, is remarkable. Like an echo for the images of Britt’s absent presence, the text is powerful and poignant, with mythological strains. In it appears a mermaid who abandons the water for the love of this evanescent man, the immemorial figure that haunts Yann-Olivier Wicht’s films, of a universe that has become a wasteland.
Jean Perret, Visions du Réel Nyon 2009