L'Oeil de l'autre

A Feature film of

John Lvoff

Produced by

Pierre Grise Productions

Production year2004

French release23/03/2005

Runtime

1h 24m

Synopsis

Two cars roll along a winding mountain road. Gaspard drives the first car and is followed by Alice. She has been employed by Gaspard to replace Peter Holm, a renowned English photographer who mysteriously disappeared a few weeks earlier.
Gaspard leaves Alice at the Hotel des Cimes. She leaves from there each morning to continue the work undertaken by Holm for the Photographic Mission to Observe Landscape. She must reproduce exactly – if possible to the same day and time – the landscape photos taken over and over again by Holm each year for the last seven years. Although this solitary work suits Alice, it’s not always easy to stay on the sidelines when the hotel’s restaurant is invaded each night by a merry gang of people unwillingly to let a woman eat dinner alone.
Alice mechanically sets about her work. Her curiosity is aroused as she begins to question Holm’s choices – why did he climb all the way to this lookout point with its view across the valley if he only wanted to photograph a detail from close up? A kind of intimacy grows between this young, withdrawn woman and the old famous photographer. Little by little she begins to understand that life depends on the way we look at things and this discovery helps her to open up to the world. She then falls under Jérôme’s spell. He’s one of the leaders of the noisy gang. And by gazing there where Holm gazed, Alice encounters his lover, Juliette. A friendship springs up between the two women. They tacitly share their knowledge, each bringing to the other a different approach to and understanding of Holm. Alice thereby unravels the mystery of his disappearance and understands how doubt can grow in one’s soul.
Then a banal robbery upsets her day to day existence and compromises her future. Will she let everything drop like her predecessor?