Crazy Quilt

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Seated on a podium in a cinema as if for a typical Q&A after a screening, Françoise Lebrun, actress here behind the camera (but in front of it too), begins by the end and politely warns her interlocutor: it will be a question of a work in the style of a quilt, of a crazy quilt. That is, of a filmed autobiography where the "I" appears unruly, like a patchwork. With the help of which pieces? Those collected on her return to England, in the places where she passed her youth, looking for her British pen pal. But this is a pretext for a more sweeping recollection that leads from the precise memories of a young girl to the very particular imagination of an entire island. Ambulation amidst the old stones and also those that replaced them, ecstatic walk in an English garden with a specialist gardener, recollection of the Bloornsbury group of painters and writers around Virginia Woolf, a make-believe meeting with David Hockney in a street: everything here adopts the colors of a tamed fantasy. The adventure, after having come across a statue of Peter Pan surrounded by birds and a fine plate of pears, comes to an end at her place, in the French countryside, in a solid building that an English couple would love to purchase. We've come full circle: bits and pieces of memory are revived; we can now rest under the eiderdown, the quilt has settled down. At least for now.