Mariana’s room: Mélanie Thierry once again impressive (critic)

Emmanuel Finkiel continues his exploration of pain related to the Shoah and signs a powerful film on the dizziness of the gaze.

We discovered Emmanuel Finkiel in 1999 with his formidable Tripspolyphonic account that questioned the memory of the deportation. The wandering of bodies and souls accompanied the dizziness of memory. His adaptation of Pain De Marguerite Duras (2017) continued this work surveying the survival of feelings even more viscerally as soon as they are covered with a smell of death. Here is Mariana’s room. Ukraine, 1943. Hugo, 12, just extirpated from the Jewish ghetto is entrusted by her mother to a prostitute installed in a brothel (Mélanie Thierry, impressive, in Ukrainian in the text) who sees German boots pass. Hidden in a cupboard, the child has observed a world decaying since this lookout. “” In the reduced, we close our eyes and we dream … The “direct” images that the child see are replaced by those of memory. In the cinema, it is also through the sound that this suture can take place. Connection thus daring between the moaning of pleasure which is feigned by his logger in full coitus and a German soldier with the cry of pain of the mother of the child in flashback. It is that everything is ready to merge. Thus confined – concealed spectator – Hugo understands without flinching that a refuge is not a haven of peace. External threats will surely skip the walls. Therefore the child will have to invest what he had ended up conceiving as a decor. From the text of Aharon Appefeld, Finkiel signs a film that is both bitter and romantic whose precision created a tension with the random pulses of chaos. Powerful, Belgium, Ho

By Emmanuel Finkiel. With Mélanie Thierry, Artem Kyryk, Julia Goldberg… Duration 2h11. Released April 23, 2025