Petits arrangements avec les morts - Pascale Ferran (1994)

Director: Pascale Ferran
Writers: Pierre Trividic, Pascale Ferran with Arnaud Desplechin collaboration
France - 1994 - color
Cast: Charles Berling, Catherine Ferran, Didier Sandre, Sabrina Leurquin, Didier Bezace, Bruno Todeschini, Guillaume Charras, Danièle Douet, Alexandre Zloto, Mathieu Robinot, Agathe De Chassey

It's summer, on the beach of this little town in Brittany (West France), a man around 40 is building a sand castle. A few people watch him. We will be told the story of three of them : a boy, Jumbo, aged 9 ; François, aged 30, and his sister Zaza, around 40. All of them had to deal with the death of somebody they cherished. How to keep on living after this?

How we deal with death is as important as how we deal with life. In fact, how we deal with death affects how we deal with life. That's the central theme of Pascale Ferran's celebrated first feature, Coming to Terms with the Dead, which won the Camera d'Or for best picture at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. The childhood trauma of losing someone close forms the common underpinning of three stories that examine how death transforms the survivors, both in the short- and long-term.
The first segment of the triptych focuses on Jumbo, a nine and one-half year old who has lost his best friend to cancer. Jumbo is racked by guilt over this loss, feeling that he somehow should have had the power to stop it.
The second and third episodes view another loss – that of a young girl killed more than twenty years ago in a moped accident – from the perspectives of her younger brother and older sister. François and Zaza are very different people, but both have been scarred by this same childhood tragedy.
The three stories unfold in a leisurely manner, as a series of disjointed, seemingly-random flashbacks which emerge during a summer afternoon that the characters spend at the beach, watching Francois and Zaza's older brother, Vincent, build an elaborate sand castle.


Sur une plage bretonne, Vincent, un quadragénaire, construit un château de sable. Il est observé par Jumbo, un garçon de dix ans qui se dit instable et vit obsédé par les morts. Sur cette plage se trouve aussi François, le frère de Vincent, qui est venu rendre visite à Zaza et Suzanne, leurs deux soeurs. Tous les quatre ont été marqués dans leur enfance par la mort de leur soeur Lili…
Le thème du film - le fait que la mort d’un proche, dont on est le témoin dans l’enfance ou l’adolescence, devient pour longtemps source de culpabilité - est développé en trois parties successives, autour de ces trois personnages. Au cours du film où s'entrecroisement des temps et des destins différents, des flash-back éclaireront les traces laissées en chacun par le deuil ancien.