The bar pillar is a common figure in cinema. Often mute, he drowns his melancholy and sorrow in alcohol leaning on zinc. But in Atlantic Bar, Fanny Molins’ first documentary, none of that. If in the small theater of this Arles harbour, patrons and regulars also put themselves on stage, it is to better chamber each other, as loudly as possible, so as never to sink into misery and self-pity. Driven by her love of old harbours, the young photographer and director has documented the disastrous fate of the Atlantic Bar in Arles, a café threatened with closure. In this puzzle of broken faces – by cigarettes, alcoholism, addictions and hardships of all kinds – shines Nathalie, the manager who mistreats as much as she mothers the regulars of her bar. A symbolic figure in our small provincial bistros, she brings order to the ranks of her fairly alcoholic male clientele, a character that even fiction could not have written about. By frequenting the Atlantic Bar for four years, Fanny Molins made strange encounters and under his camera parade a poet, a former homeless person or even a repentant robber, with fingers tattooed with spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds to better cheat at poker. The director told us that she had also made the impromptu acquaintance of an aspiring cowboy from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, who unfortunately died before filming, who traveled the 35 kilometers that separated him from the Atlantic Bar on horseback. See also on Konbini Thanks to this gallery of unlikely characters, Fanny Molins manages to capture all the romantic potential of this picturesque harbor without giving in to an essentialization of this type of place in danger of disappearance which sometimes makes our young generation nostalgic.Clairvoyance and chiaroscuro Filmed in the natural, summer light of the sunny streets of Arles, Atlantic Bar is as cinematic in its protagonists as it is photographic in its aesthetics. Pretty chiaroscuros soften these bodies weathered by the sun and alcohol, these “bar pillars” that we don’t look at and that the director wants to reinscribe in the territory in which they live. Filmed in static and close-up shots, these bodies tell a lot of the story of their owners. of the movie in its own right. She thus inscribes her documentary in the continuity of the photo series that she had devoted to the Atlantic, without overaesthetizing its ugliness with its old-fashioned charm. Then suddenly, the camera moves away in a tumult and Nathalie, Jean-Jacques, Claude and the others stop the performance to deliver their dented slice of life, sometimes wise and lucid, sometimes resigned, sometimes alcoholic and their speech then takes more unexpected detours. From these confidences shines through all the intimacy of the director with her subjects whom she films with delicacy and tenderness, without shame of what they are or have been. of Lille where she is from, the location of the Atlantic Bar in Arles – a city subject to significant artistic gentrification, located in the Bouches-du-Rhône department particularly affected by poverty – offers a completely different reading to her documentary . We would also be curious to know Nathalie’s view of the wildlife that invades her town every summer on the occasion of the Rencontres de la photographie. On the second day of filming, the owners of the Atlantic Bar learned of the implementation sale of their business. Nathalie plunged back into alcoholism and suddenly, the documentary became much more political – but never demonstrative – making the themes addressed all the more resonate, those of the bar as a social fabric that would compensate for the failings of our modern society. .The Atlantic Bar closed its doors nine months ago and its former owners, in a precarious situation, occupy it illegally. Regulars continue to frequent it but now bring their own drinks. The director, she, launched a kitty to try to save this symbolic place. his producer: “I don’t know if we can talk about censorship, but it’s obviously a political act to decide not to broadcast the film. It is an invisibilization of people already invisibilized.
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