“The film’s most affecting moments are those least concerned with narrative coherence, unfolding instead as loose, fragmentary recollections.”

“I’m turning over inside my grave, you’re waking up to face a brand new day.
The thoughts I tried to sway would not behave.
I’m waiting for you to be late.” – Rolling Over, Low Roar

In Literature and the Right to Death, the French philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot writes: “There is no question that we are preoccupied with dying. But why?” As beings who move inexorably toward death while bearing full awareness of this trajectory, mortality appears to be the only true certainty of our existence. In many respects, it is precisely this awareness that defines us as human. Yet death does not conclude our presence. Rather, those who outlive us are compelled, through memory, to relive our departure again and again. For Blanchot, the dead leave behind, above all, death itself: what persists is the impossibility of fully dying, the undoing of the human for those who depart, and for those who remain, the enduring anxiety of contemplating death.

A similar meditation underlies Lou Colpé’s Comme un château fort (Like a Fortress). Structured around the death of her partner, the film ultimately becomes an affirmation of the filmmaker’s continued existence. Through the construction of a visual diary of mourning, death permeates every aspect of her daily life: in the photographs scattered throughout her home, in condolence voice messages, and in the visits of friends. Colpé frantically gathers traces that render her partner’s absence tangible. In doing so, she confirms, again and again, that he is no longer present, yet through this very refusal to let go, she also affirms that as long as she lives, as long as she remains “capable of dying” in Blanchot’s terms, his existence persists in reiteration.

Hence, Comme un château fort often feels less like a conventional film than an intimate act of intrusion into a private journal. For this very reason, it is unsurprising that much of Colpé’s work is devoted to constructing a deeply personal memorial, a kind of sanctuary. Old photographs, small objects, gifts, and even lists of her partner’s favorite jokes accumulate into an archive of intimacy. Confronted with the impossibility of ever fully grasping another person’s life in its entirety, she turns instead to these fragments as a means of approaching the totality of memory. In this process, Colpé becomes an archaeologist of her own grief, while the viewer assumes the role of a silent apprentice, following her attempt to weave these remnants into a fragile but coherent narrative thread.

Here, cinema and narrative cease to function merely as tools of preservation; instead, they operate as mechanisms of reinscription, embedding the deceased within the lived reality of the surviving subject. Colpé’s approach to images is therefore necessarily erratic. It is a painful exercise, perhaps even an act of self-punishment shaped by the guilt of survival. Significant gaps remain, alongside a marked refusal of chronological order. Death interrupts time; and when time resumes, it does so unevenly, resisting linear reconstruction.

Consequently, the film’s most affecting moments are those least concerned with narrative coherence, unfolding instead as loose, fragmentary recollections. Scenes with social gatherings or visits from friends offer fleeting glimpses of a life reassembled, yet they pale beside the immediacy of Colpé’s recollection of the moment she learned about her partner’s death. Her narration, marked by overlapping, incomplete sentences, is paired with disjointed, intimate footage that saturates the screen. The discomfort she evokes, down to the detail of her bright-red nail polish, anchors the abstraction of loss in the stubborn specificity of the body: both the lifeless body in the morgue and the living one she is condemned to carry.

To conclude, it is fitting to return to Blanchot, who writes in the same work: “we cannot do anything with an object that has no name.” Perhaps this is the essence of Colpé’s painful undertaking: to name people, objects, and feelings in order to render them tangible, and thus, in some fragile sense, to resist their disappearance.