Quote:
Almost the entire hour and three-quarters of Jean Eustache’s 1971 film “Numéro Zéro” is filled with the director’s interview of his grandmother Odette Robert on Feb. 12th of that year. Eustache includes in the film the conditions of its production—the director himself is seated at the table with her, pours her some whiskey, speaks with the camera operator, manipulates the clapboard at the head and tail of the reels, and even takes a phone call from a foreign firm that wants to distribute one of his early short films. Odette Robert had come from her home in the provinces to live with Eustache in Paris and help care for his son Boris (who is seen, at the beginning of the film, helping guide her through the streets of Paris—she had recently had eye operations and had to wear dark lenses, including on-camera).
Odette Robert, who was seventy-one, speaks rapidly and lucidly, and tells the story of her life, starting from her early childhood in villages in the Bordeaux region. She tells stories of poignant, fleeting charm—of her first seven years, before her mother’s untimely death. Most of the rest of the story of her life is horror and pain broken only by absurdity. Her father remarried and her stepmother was a classic monster, cold, selfish, and brutal. She married at sixteen and had three children in three years, then another; three of those children died young. (She describes, in terrible detail, the effects on local children of epidemic diseases such as diphtheria.) Her husband—who lost an eye after two weeks of combat in the First World War—was a serial philanderer who faced charges for having sex with a thirteen-year-old, then, later, contracted syphilis. Odette, who had been a good (if insubordinate) student (who, when reprimanded by the principal, bit her on the nose and the cheek, scarring her for life), ended her schooling at fourteen and worked in a factory; she wore ragged hand-me-down clothing and men’s wooden clogs. During the Second World War, her daughter lay dangerously ill with peritonitis in German-occupied Biarritz and she needed to apply to the authorities for a visit—a process that took a month. Her younger brother was interned in a concentration camp and came out broken by the experience.
Numero zero - J. Eustache (1971-2003) 1080p.mkv General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 51 min Size: 10.2 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 1480x1080 Aspect ratio: 1.370 Frame rate: 24.000 fps Bit rate: 12.8 Mb/s BPP: 0.332 Audio #1: French 1.0ch FLAC @ 289 kb/s
https://nitro.download/view/85124DCFB01753E/Numero_zero_-_J._Eustache_(1971-2003)_1080p.mkv
Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French