The Mountain

"In the village and in the country, there were soon more cop vans passing by than wild birds." After One and a Half, here is Valfret again with a great stormy and telluric book, a book that screams and breathes. The Mountain tells the story of a man's quest for meaning teenager in a rural world and family that are slowly dying, his lack of prospects in an ecocidal and authoritarian society… Even the The revolts that are rumbling in the country are happening far away, in the city. He forgets everything in a vodka-based mixture, in a fantasy of burning the mayor's Porsche and the memory of the ass of the loved one. Life is in the trees, in the hills, in the sun that makes the fields vibrate and in the storm that threatens… Valfret's variations on fields, valleys, decrepit facades tell the intimate, social and political story without long speeches of a character and the places he sees daily. His thoughts go back in old buildings, rest on the silent landscapes of a village anonymous, or seem to arise from the storm, to disperse in the wind like the smoke from a firecracker. As with Alex Barbier, the voice of a narrator and what he saw haunt us, and as in Barbier this solitary voice is surrounded by emptiness, that its simple and shattering sentences fill and create tension. His story foggy is made of memories, fantasies and rumors, deliberately disturbing, moving from one subject to another and depriving us of a human figure. From the darkness can arise poetry, grotesque, desires, rage, and dark evidence collides in the head of a teenager. Each landscape here is a tension, a fight between several inspirations, several techniques. Blurred or bursting with color, the settings are inhabited by a growing energy, a disorder, a lurking violence ready to unleash, until the narrator disappears and seems to dissolve into the campaign.