Marc Isaacs
United Kingdom | 2001 | 24 min
Language : English
Subtitle : French
Marc Isaacs installs his camera in the lift of a block of flats in London, not knowing how its inhabitants are going to react to this intrusion. The simplicity of the set-up is able to reveal, in a few salient features, a multicultural microcosm peopled with protagonists who are in turns fragile or larger than life.
When Marc Isaacs decides to set up his camera in the lift of a London residential building, he does not know how its inhabitants will react to this simple, absurd, slightly invasive device that disrupts the routine of their atomised lives. Filmed under constraints (the unknown duration of the vertical journeys, robotic “voice-over” announcing the floors, etc.) transformed into virtues, Lift is a little gem of documentary comedy. The lift, like a miniature film studio—the flies, a kind of metaphorical and ironic double of the director, which appear in certain cut-aways, come from a pet shop! —allows individuals to act out, to become the actors of their “minuscule lives” for a few seconds, compelled by the open questions of their interlocutor—What did you dream last night? Tell me your best childhood memory... The apparent fluidity of the exchanges, entirely reassembled in the editing, thus reveals a teeming microcosm populated by fragile, larger than life and, above all, very human protagonists.
Emmanuel Chicon
