🎬 Les Feuilles Mortes: L'amour à la mer (1965)

Guy Gilles | 1965 | France | 73’ | EN subtitles

A young Parisian woman falls in love with a sailor she meets on holiday. Summer brings them together, autumn takes them in different directions. He returns to Brest, she to Paris, hoping for the chance to see him again. They continue writing while living separate lives. Chansons, photographs, flashbacks, and collages drift through the film, allowing past and present, memory and lived experience to constantly overlap. As the relationship begins to fade, the figures left wandering through the film embody both a sense of desolation and the possibility of another life.

The debut feature of the singular and unjustly overlooked Guy Gilles, with brief appearances by Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliette Gréco and Jean-Claude Brialy.

The transition from summer to autumn has long been a poetic symbol of change. Perhaps this is why the French call it 'Les Feuilles Mortes'. A love fading, an aspiration, the fear of forgetting, a goodbye to what was familiar. Everything transforms, taking on another form.