Le partage

At a gala evening, a well-known actor cracks under pressure, tormented by the incisive thoughts of his vampiric double. An unidentified cinematic object adapted from the play of the same name, Le Partage visualizes, through sound and animation, the sharp monologue of the Quebecois actor and playwright Emmanuel Schwartz.

Emmanuel Schwartz reveals the scars, the cigarette burns, and the depths of his artistically mediated skin in his meteoric rise. A pockmarked skin that takes on water. The fall of the young prodigy is legendary, and yet we see ourselves in it: a crowd as vast as an ocean cheers us on, we pluck stars from the sky, then our hearts shatter, drugs, all the drugs, to plug the cracks, the nauseating lies to loved ones, waking up on a plane, in a limousine, at a gala, in an alley, we don’t know anymore, isolation, self-loathing, money burning through our fingers. Like in anonymous circles for addiction recovery, we, spectators, are called as witnesses and are part of the healing process. Will we offer our absolution to this beautiful cursed poet?

A game of encrypted confidences, a self-reflective examination, an exploration of programmed self-destruction. This tale of controlled zero skid is delivered to us in the form of a story to never sleep again. The actor, both sleepwalker and tightrope walker, moves forward without a safety net, one step at a time, on the dizzying line of autofiction.

In presence of the director Emmanuel Schwartz on March 23, 2024 at Concordia University — J.A. de Sève in Montréal

Word of direction

I question our way of making cinema. By adapting my theatrical text for the screen, I understood that I was also questioning our way of making theater. In essence, I question our way of being artists. ​“Le Partage” is certainly an unidentified and demanding cinematic object, halfway between Durassian recitative, theatrical capture, and a genre film that is not easy to approach but has allowed me to advance in a reflection that is built, work by work, writing by writing, and film by film, on the path of a joyful experimentation. Dan Pink says, ​“Writing is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe.” I would add that for me, creation is a way of discovering what I want to be and what I want to see, in short, of better understanding all the work that still lies ahead of me.

- Emmanuel Schwartz