- On Christmas Eve in Paris, Stéphane, Joëlle, Xavier and Sonia decide to go for a walk in the park overlooking the city of their childhood. At the bend of the winding alleys, they evoke pop music, their work, sex and disappointed ambitions.
- Sèvres, Hauts-de-Seine. Four friends are walking on the heights of Paris, a huge hill overlooking the scenery, giving a glimpse of a valley full of life, an endless perspective, up to the hill opposite. A group of four often separated in two, accentuating individualities but especially the dialogue between the two. The group has never been as well filmed as at Hers. The protagonists cross each other, exchanging places without any premeditation. One of them falls behind because he lights a cigarette. The other stands out in order to make a phone call. But each time the present is prolonged. There is not one focus, there are several. And in a few sequences, regularly captured in a single rear tracking shot - Hers films the group in the opposite direction to the one filmed by Van Sant: from the front. They move forward, the camera moves backwards - interfering with ideas, bringing to the sequence a break or a surprising choice, either in its triviality or even sometimes with a more comical leaning. A group walking together, two boys swapping on one side, two women on the other. A path taken by some while the others take a shortcut. Maybe they always do this, maybe it's the first time, we don't know. Then the group reconvenes a few seconds later and the plan, because it hasn't changed, abandons the boys' discussion to interfere with the girls' discussion. Another time, when one of them notices that she only talks with one of them about music, that they do not engage in any conversation other than musical, it is the other one, disappeared by a grid in the background a little earlier, that reappears above them, by a big fence to frighten them gently. This is the cinema of Hers, this so singular and authentic way of filming the group. Writing is an event with Hers, each dialogue is magnificent, a perfect alchemy that avoids both ease and pose, ampoule or trivial dialogue. Or else it is an intelligent triviality. But Hers' cinema is also crossed by a melancholic current of a rare intensity. Primrose Hill doesn't stop there, it's even where it begins. It is a voice-over that opens the film, that of a woman. She speaks about the group, a group of five while we only see four characters. It evokes a London hill when we seem to be in Paris. This voice-over comes back regularly, but stands out from the image, it occupies an important place without stifling this present we have before our eyes. An incredibly rich present which, in addition to this stroll that ends with an improvised game of soccer, a trip to the hospital to visit a friend (close for some, almost unknown for others, this choice is important) who has just come out of intensive care, a walk in the media library and then later, offers, when the film finally chooses its two central characters, two incredible sequences. The first one, a scene of seduction in a room, of a wonderful finesse and modesty, as she reveals their nudity to both of them. The second, a return to the parents' home of one of them, an upsetting father/son discussion that highlights what we were beginning to suspect about this fifth ghostly character, who until now only appeared in voice-over. I hadn't seen such beautiful dialogue since Rohmer. And I had never before seen a group so well filmed in its individuality. It's a film that I feel incredibly close to and in which I see a lot of myself. This hill of Primrose Hill, although you never see it in the film, so well evoked in the diary of the missing girl, as well as this photograph, the ultimate peacetime snapshot (replaced in the last shot by one from the present, with four people) will remain in my memory for a long time. In Primrose Hill, the weight of the past, its pains as well as its happiness, inevitably swallowed up, is systematically caught up by a present that is fragile but worth surviving. One can see the film as a construction in partition because if the music is concretely preponderant there (it is regularly evoked, the group of friends also seems to be a group of pop musicians and especially this fifth voice evokes Primrose Hill like the journey towards the lands entoned in the refrain of a certain piece...) it also intervenes formally, Hers choosing a four-instrument start (long discussion during the ballad) before isolating two of them (intimacy of the birth of a love) to conclude with only one, the soloist (the return to the parents' home) and thus creating a kind of pop melody with sweet accents of youthfulness and great possible hopes.
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