The art of seeing in je veux voir

Abstract

Made in the aftermath of the war in Lebanon of 2006, Je veux voir (Mille et une productions, 2008) is a road movie which pairs the icon of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve, with the Lebanese actor Rabih Mroué. He is her driver and guide, she is his muse. He is “at home” in his country, she is cocooned by her fame. But, like most road movies, these comfort zones will be disturbed by the encounter between different lives and, as the film's title suggests, different ways of seeing. In a subtle reworking of the intertwining of separate lives and traumatic pasts of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (Argos Films, 1959), the film establishes a complex network of intersections between the man and woman, the West and the Middle East, and between image and the real so that the specificity of each life, time, place, and image is troubled by traces of elsewhere. In Resnais’ film, “lui” famously says to “elle” “You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” yet the encounter between the two opens up new ways of seeing for both. Similarly, in Je veux voir, “opening one's eyes” means just such a Benjaminian encounter with the traces of history.