Filmmaker Philippe Garrel has always discussed the importance of painting for his cinema, and specifically the painting of his longtime friend Frédéric Pardo. In this film, Pardo documents the Garrel inner circle in Morocco on the set of Le Lit de la vierge. The stars of the Garrel film were Pierre Clémenti and Zouzou, but here it is Garrel’s peripheral actors who take center stage : Pierre-Richard Bré, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Didier Léon, Babette Lamy, and above all the luminous Tina Aumont, Frédéric Pardo’s girlfriend at the time. The dreamy Romantic vision of the film shows the influence of the English pre-Raphaelite painters, several years before Garrel’s Le Berceau de cristal. The Zanzibar equivalent of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, Pardo’s home movie is a mystical, life-affirming celebration.
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