User Reviews

The absent protagonist, the friends concur, was handsome, brilliant, quirky, a dandy. The comments and impressions by the various young men and women amount to a portrait of themselves as well as of him, and form a meditation on memory, the nature of friendship, and on the responsibilities friendship incurs after years of non-contact. Clearly, the absent man very deliberately made the choice to live the life he leads and is not at all keen on re-establishing contact with his old friends. Several of the friends indicate they experience his behavior as a rejection of their bourgeois lives. They are not always so sure about their choices themselves either, and the title (Dérive/Drift) applies thus not just, or even primarily, to the disappeared man. This documentary helps impose coherence on what otherwise might have been a mere string of talking-heads by means of two elegant stylistic features: it portrays a person completely via his friends; and none of these mentions his name. Several times, there is a zoom-in on one person in a class-photograph, but it is always on the speaker of that moment. At the end, the camera pans across the photograph, so the viewer presumably sees the protagonist – but without knowing who he is. This is not just teasing: we are curious to know who he is but, on reflection, we presumably realize that a mere photo-likeness does not really tell us very much, and moreover that, if the man does not even want to meet his friends, we have even less right to invade his privacy. More profoundly, the decision to "show-but-not-show" the protagonist may make us wonder how well we can actually ever know another person anyway. With all its talking and focus on "absence" this is a very French film - but one that intrigues and makes you ponder your own friendships as well as the choices in life you have made.