Divided into three chapters, A General Disappointment is an existential meditation based on a text read through a series of long still frames. These stage the director Serge Garcia in everyday situations that are suffused with a depressive sense of the grotesque, where what is mundane becomes absurd, thus weighing heavily on the character’s solitary body. As a counterpoint to this silent, pedestrian everyday scene, the text may be seen in subtitles, like some inner voice that brings to mind, through the telling of odd anecdotes, the caustic meanderings of Woody Allen or Larry David. The basic logorrheic scheme to A General Disappointment matches its wonderous precision as well as its reflexive density. After Grand Central Hotel (FID 2021), Serge Garcia again puts together a cinematic object at the service of discourse, and devises a means to bring together literature (his own and, among others, by Kathryn Scanlan) and philosophical thought (by Lauren Berlant). This he does by dint of neat, long framings. As Serge Garcia is sitting in a parked car, eating away from a noodle dish that inevitably brings to mind the dreariness of an undercover cop’s life in second-rate crime films, the text invites one to ponder over the systemic failures inherent to capitalist societies, and over how vain their promises of happiness and self-fulfilment are. Short scenes come and go from the street to a room, in a motion reasserting the political dimension of the intimate. In so doing, it also confirms that the necessary analysis of our most personal affects (feelings of maladjustment, frustrations, neuroses) are themselves manufactured and normed. Through a close-up on an amplifier, the voice of Laurene LaVallis, some soon-forgotten 1980s singer, reverses the operation of concentration, from reading to full listening as a potentiality for a reappropriation of one’s body in the present. Unostentatiously, what Serge Garcia weaves is some presence in the world and unto oneself.
(Claire Lasolle)