The White Disease (La maladie blanche) by Christelle Lheureux

The White Disease by Christelle Lheureux takes place in an isolated village of the Pyrenees on a hot summer night. We meet the main characters during the aftermath of a village party: children gather around the fire to talk about ogres, while teenagers dance to kitschy pop music or search for a hidden place to exchange embraces. Even the grown-ups are in a special mood: a group of people plays with a frog and a man asks: “What will happen if I kiss it?” Christelle Lheureux cuts the scene off, although the scent of possibilities remains lingering in the air. As the music starts to fade and the village gets covered by darkness, an ogre comes out of its den and seduces a little girl to follow it into the woods.

Lheureux creates a specific atmosphere of a summer night when everything is possible. Her manipulations of reality are subtle. She relies on black and white photography to distance the viewer from a sense of immediate reality, and tries to emphasize the magic in everyday situations, like the light of fireflies and baaing of sheep. In the soundtrack, distant beats of party music change places with nightly sounds and noises, which also gives a dreamy touch to the whole. So when the monster actually comes out of the cave where the prehistoric drawings are hidden, we are not surprised that it looks like a wild boar. Instead, we believe that the wild boar IS the monster!

One could easily mistake The White Disease for the story about growing up: an ending of the period when magic coexisted with the real world. Quite the opposite, The White Disease shows that magic is still an integral part of people’s lives. Teenagers find it in the coloured photographs on their mobile phones, kids in the shadows by the fire or reflections in the mirror. Even the ending doesn’t bring the expected “awakening from a dream”, leaving both the viewers and characters charmed by everything that happened in the cave and around it.

Christelle Lheureux’ film shows that nobody is immune to magic. And it only takes an idea of kissing a frog to cure the white disease that made the drawings in the cave fade away, and to make them shine again in the torch light… or lurk from the dark!

By Mario Kozina