Abstract

In Pas Perdus (2008), a film by Saguenail, we find ourselves in a “labyrinthic-space” pursuing a woman, with a suitcase and an umbrella in hand. The woman (Leonor Keil) crosses a metaphorical night inhabited by beings who try to describe her or, at least, interpret her. As witnesses, we hold our breath with the footsteps of this Woman in a city she doesn’t know (or does she know?). This nameless woman is a character in abandonment, that doesn’t want to be saved. In fact, we are facing a character who accepts an irreconcilable fate that the spectator is unaware of, but which, intimately, he/she senses as his/her own. Actually, the solitary voyage implies, for this character, the vortex of fear that only the night seems to assuage. Has a happiness project failed, one wonder. We don’t know, just as we don’t know what the character is carrying in her suitcase. In Pas Perdus, the director poetically discusses the human need to relate to an otherness, almost as if, paradoxically, we, as humans, on one hand could not live alone but, on the other hand, do not know how to live together. With this paper, and grounded on the film Pas Perdus (Saguenail, 2008), we intend to analyze the dramaturgical design of the characters on film taking in account the following aspects: (i) characters constructed around a social body, where the archetype is decisive for the film’s narrative; (ii) characters created on a psychological and intrapersonal body; (iii) the role of the spectator in attributing meanings.