The performative force of La Ribot had not yet been exploited by fiction cinema until Delphine Lehericey (The Horizon) put her in the loop. The award-winning Swiss filmmaker has gone far in her song about dance and the elderly – or dance in the elderly – which is Our Last Dance, an example of poetic cinema that captivated the audience at the last edition of the Locarno Festival and in which La Ribot exercises of itself. That is, a transgressive choreographer, an icon of multidisciplinary art who is often inspired by her own performers.
Especially when it involves a septuagenarian (François Berléand) who has suddenly been widowed and who asks her to let him fulfill the promise he made to his wife: to finish whatever it was that she had left halfway. Her wife, in this fiction, participated in nothing less than a piece that La Ribot is about to premiere. A dance with bodies of all ages and sizes, as they are all valid to express human connection.
The Swiss director and the Madrid-based artist based in Geneva – who currently has an exhibition at the Max Estrella gallery in Madrid and in April her iconic DIEstinguished pieces arrive at the TNC – passed through Barcelona yesterday promoting this film that hits theaters next week Spanish braiding duel, comedy and contemporary dance.
“When Delphine came with her script, the choreographer was a little more cliché, like a diva who was unfriendly to the dancers. But there was no reason to draw her like that, it was preferable that she be truly believable, in the sense of love for the body and love for the other, trying to understand him and get the best out of him. I also asked him to calm down that image we have of dance as something boring, or of La Ribot as someone very crazy,” notes the performer.
Her function in the film was to be a physical link between the script and what she, as a choreographer, could do with the body of German, the protagonist. “The most interesting and difficult thing was to give shape to his desire to awaken, an awakening that has to be through the body and dance,” she adds, fascinated with the amount of space that the film leaves for the specific work of dance and his specific work.
Lehericey, for his part, confesses that when he was young he made dance videos, “until I realized that what I wanted was to work with actors, to make films. Our last dance is another opportunity to try to reach the truth of creation. That’s why I wrote that story about an older man who is in mourning and for whom moving can mean that something changes.” “Being old is perhaps the most beautiful part of yourself,” he adds. “I fear death, but if we decide to be actors in our lives, maybe we can take that path without fear.”
Age and the passage of time is not something that La Ribot has been very aware of. And the approach that she makes as choreographer/actress in Our Last Dance to the septuagenarian character is based on this premise. “I have never thought that there was an age in the picture. And the truth is that when I turned 60, which was last year, I was frozen and it gave me a shock, because it is the first time that I really realized that I was there, in the 60s, and I still think that it is not true. I remember those older people who think they are 25, because I am the same,” jokes the artist.
