Adieu mon général

July. All the ingredients of summer holidays in the South of France – the beach, the open-air balls, chance encounters, love stories beginning – and ending.
"Is this about documenting the daily routine of love, to create a fiction around the end of a story? Muriel Montini refuses to share things this way, and her previous films (her short films, especially) have already shown this with firmness. Instead, she treats cinema as a massive operation, even though her resources are clearly modest, and she adapts to it with virtuosity. It is precisely this alliance between its raw, almost thrown together aspect of scenes we might call ‘stolen’ – at popular dances, in the street, on the beach, at horse races, in the flat too (the most delicate, of course) – and a precision in the framing and editing which at times are uneven, disordered, whose mastery, in a word, does not reveal itself from the outset, but rather through its tenacity, that gives value to Adieu.
The General in question is here obviously the object of that love, and he will gradually lose his stripes. But he also functions as a sort of cinematic position – interventionist, self-confident, someone to organise plans like a good little soldier. It’s a twofold battle that is waged, therefore. How to speak about (almost) nothing: waking up late hidden under a pillow, money problems, the name of the neighbourhood, lulls in conversations, disappointment, without distorting the
crumbs of meaning in a gesture that is much too vast for them. In a wider sense, how to say ‘adieu’ to known order and to write a new script that is, finally, contemporary." (Jean-Pierre Rehm, FIDMarseille 2009)