Aude Léa Rapin’s Les héros ne meurent jamais (Heroes don’t die) begins with Joachim (Jonathan Couzinié), a thin, bearded young man, being instructed to recount how he was accosted by an older Eastern European man in the streets of Paris. The man had mistaken him for someone else, someone called Zoran, who he insulted as either a “criminal” or “soldier” (perhaps he was both). Then Joachim delivers the kicker, which he says carefully and slowly, as if disclosing a secret. The man, still believing Joachim to be Zoran, then said the date that this “Zoran” had died: August 21 1983. The date happens to be Joachim’s birthday, and Joachim is now a grown man. A mistaken encounter turns into a reincarnation mystery. This opening, filmed during the day on a grainy, unfocused camera at Joachim’s apartment in Paris, sets up both the premise and the tone of Les Héros’s film-within-a-film.
Joachim’s friend Alice (Adèle Haenel) later emerges from behind the camera as the director filming Joachim’s story. She is supported by two friends: the dedicated if somewhat clumsy Virginie (Antonia Buresi), and a cameraman named Paul we never see (a possible nod to Les Héro’s actual cinematographer, Paul Guilhaume). After Joachim’s story, we see her filming (or rather, see Paul’s film of her filming) Joachim, who is mysteriously awake at night, standing like a zombie in the middle of the living room. When he finds drawings that he doesn’t remember making, with icons he doesn’t understand and the name of a Bosnian town scribbled on his arm, he takes this as a sign that he may in fact be the reincarnation of this mysterious Zoran. With these details in tow, Alice, Joachim, Virginie and Paul the invisible cameraman head east to continue their documentary.
In Bratunac, an town on Bosnia’s eastern border, they search for information. They’re armed with only three facts about Zoran: his first name, that he was a soldier or a criminal, and that he died on August 21, 1983. Lapin’s own meta-directorial hand seems more interested in playing with Alice’s film than successfully delivering it. Little inconveniences, such as the crew being told that one in ten people in Bosnia is called Zoran – reveal the shaky premises of the film, and serve as a commentary on the constraints of documentary filmmaking in general. Loose happenstances, pasted over with post-hoc significance, are welded together into a deceptively unitary narrative. Lapin undermines documentary’s staple shots – intimate conversations, place-setting openers – by continually breaking the fourth wall. “Was this conversation okay?” Joachim asks the camera sarcastically after being filmed having an upsetting personal discussion with a friend. “What are you doing?” asks someone else when Alice attempts an experimental place-setting shot. Later, we see her re-positioning people for maximum aesthetic effect.
The question of documentary ethics is deeply relevant to the premise of both Alice’s film and Rapin’s film about her film. In both cases, a group of young Parisians head east to a small Bosnian town and the hunt for a former soldier – in all its levels of reality – inevitably dregs up local memories of the war. Privileged city filmmakers film less privileged rural subjects, ferreting around for some audience-friendly trauma, and justify themselves with the claim that they are telling important histories. “How many times do I have to tell this story?” a local woman in Bratunac asks when prompted to give her own experiences of the civil war – “Why are filmmakers always hunting the dead?” After an interviewee asks Alice how she intends to portray Bosnia in her film her question is met by silence – no-one in the crew has considered the broader implications of their project, even though it falls into ethically conflicted territory. As a local in Bratunac puts it in her interview, western Europeans often hold a superiority complex about their eastern counterparts, depicting these nations only through the lens of loss and trauma. In their single-minded mission to find Joachim’s mystery ghost, Alice’s crew have forgotten about the larger world in which their project falls, and what they owe the people whose stories they minutely document. When Alice meets up with a former friend who happens to live locally, she receives a mild lashing – “I thought you loved me. You only wanted to film me”. Filmmaking does not guarantee love, or even empathy. It is often extractive. When Joachim sees a man he believes to be ‘Zoran’’s son, he hugs him, overcome with emotion. It’s the perfect reunion shot. He gets a punch in the face.
This isn’t just a light-hearted road trip among friends. After Alice and Joachim have an intense argument about what they’re doing there in the first place, we learn that something else is motivating their almost mystical faith in the realness of reincarnation. A comedic, fantastical ghost story turns into a humanising, occasionally difficult tale of what it means to document one’s life in the face of imminent loss. Though their journey runs parallel to that of Bosnian characters processing their own experiences of the war, Alice, Joachim, and Virginie do not try to take ownership of this history, or even carve out a space for themselves within it. They’re just visitors dealing with their own mess – and learning history always involves grappling with how tiny your life is against the weight of the world. If anything, the protagonists of Les héros emerge from their film humbled, aware of their own smallness. It’s this realisation that lifts up both films – Alice’s road trip-documentary-turned-archival-document, and Rapin’s bold and ambitious feature.
