The legendary French director of such classic films as A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), And Now My Love (Toute une vie) and Bolero (Les uns et les autres) talks about his Flanders film favourite, Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come as You Are (Hasta la vista), and what the film did to him when he saw it at the fortieth edition of the Montreal World Film Festival last year. ‘I have rarely got such a kick out of discovering a film that was so completely unexpected,’ the filmmaker admits.
‘I am in this multiplex at the Montreal World Film Festival. While I am waiting to go to a master class I’m giving, I decide to go into one of the cinemas at random. A film is starting and I have no idea what I am about to see. Nothing out of the ordinary up to now.
As I sit down in my seat, I am totally oblivious to the fact that it is about to roll away and that I am going to be thrown into the world of those people for whom I rarely spare a second thought. But it is the exact opposite that happens: I find a blind man staring at me through the screen of my prejudices.
I have rarely got such a kick out of discovering a film that was so completely unexpected.
Come as You Are is an audacious film. As it unfolds, one question keeps nagging me: how can such a risky subject as physical disability be so aptly dealt with? I fall in love with it. It is love at first sight.
This unassuming film is like no other. It has all the virtues of a great film. Its characters have me laughing one minute and crying the next, transforming the viewer that I am into a bipolar state while remaining perfectly lucid.
By the end of what is, in many ways, a coming-of-age road movie, I am humming the film’s song, Et si tu n’existais pas (And if You Didn’t Exist), with the characters. And as I get up from my seat, I say to myself that, thankfully, they do exist. And that I have an urgent desire to shout ‘Hasta la vista’ from the rooftops!
The next day, I learn that other people have been on the same journey: the film won the festival’s Grand Prize of the Americas, the Audience Award as well as the Ecumenical Jury Award.’ (i)