Aude Léa Rapin’s Heroes Don’t Die (Les Héros ne meurent jamais) brings the spectators into the world of a film crew in search of answers to a paranormal experience. Taking the journey from their native Paris to Bosnia, the principal actors take up the various roles of the small crew. Debuting at the 2019 International Critics’ Week at Cannes, Rapin’s first feature film is an intelligent meditation on the implications of how we fictionalize reality, starring Adèle Haenel (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Deerskin) as Alice, a stoic journalist and director indulging in her friend’s sudden belief in reincarnation.
Returning to an uncomfortably familiar terrain, film crew in hand, she accompanies Joachim (Jonathan Couzinié) as he searches for a man who he believes may be himself in the past. Directed by Alice, Joachim recounts the experience that led him to this crisis of identity with a passionate surety. While traversing the streets of Paris, he was approached by a man who believed him to be a Bosnian soldier responsible for the atrocities committed during the Bosnian War. This claim would be unbelievable under almost any other circumstances, however, the date that the man recites as the date of Zoran’s demise is very familiar to Joachim, being the date of his birth.
Alice and her crew, composed of a sound engineer and a cameraman, throw themselves into a search for Zoran in a country visibly wounded by the war. The backdrop of a war-torn country and the documentary-style encounters with the survivors who mourn of such tragedy leads the film into a direction of loss and suffering that is then reversed, or perhaps placed aside, by the surreal feelings of their search for Zoran. The setting is a tragic one, yet Joachim is frustratingly too caught up in his struggle to quite acknowledge any ghosts other than his own. His whims stretch the patience of Alice, who is struggling with her return to Bosnia, and the slow realization that his story may have been, intentionally or not, fabricated. Virginie (Antonia Buresi), the crew’s sound engineer, provides much-needed cheer against the brooding Alice, and the afflicted whininess of Joachim. Paul, the cameraman, portrayed by the film’s cinematographer, Paul Guilhaume, is silent and omnipresent, as his job permits, giving him the role of the viewer.
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There are the makings of a complex family dynamic within the crew. A beautiful shot from the beginning of their journey stays in mind— Paul looking out from a window and observing the house beyond them, frigid in the rain, while hearing the familiar sound of Alice and Virginie talking. It’s a scene with the comforting feeling of unity that permeates throughout the film, though perhaps underlying in some parts, despite the eventual strain between the characters. Even if there is no direct intimacy in this shot, the camaraderie is undeniable. Contrasting the paranormal premise and the war-torn landscapes of Bosnia, there are many signs of human life— the sound of the cars passing on the highway, Virginie’s sound tests, people in the background playing football, the hum of a coffee maker, and the sounds of nature as wind whistles through the grass. Reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s naturalistic capture of sound, the natural sound mix and lack of non-diegetic audio is immensely satisfying. As Alice says midway through the film, sometimes it’s easier to live in a story than to face the reality of things, leading us to wonder where exactly that stopping point might be.
The story, and whether Joachim’s ideas have any basis, may shift, roaming as Alice and the crew pursue the journey with their ghosts, but the twists remain believable. Despite her frustration with Joachim and his ever-changing whims, it is easy to understand why Alice remains dedicated to helping him, and we can empathize with her as she and Virginie are essentially made a receptacle for emotional labor by him. The final film has been somewhat wrongly maligned by Haenel’s filmography, as one of the more introspective/arthouse-leaning screen projects she’s done, and the film fits neatly into a more naturalist cinematic regime, a worthy follow-up to the Buresi and Couzinié starring short Long Live the Emperor a few years back.
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