I wrote the poem Un amour souterrain ("An Underground Love") in 2019 whilst living in Moscow and spending a lot of time on the subway inventing fictional love stories about passengers who caught my eye. Inspired by the ephemeral love stories of Brassens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rohmer and many others, I challenged myself to put these transient desires into verse.
It is a very visual poem, strongly anchored in the time-space of the Moscow subway and its surroundings. If the written word can be sufficient on its own, my progressive discovery of collage as a means of spatial representation made me want to illustrate this poem with vignettes that show a glimpse of an underground world that is both inhabited and imagined.
The characters I have chosen to illustrate this poem are taken from films that have left a mark on me, particularly in the way they tell the story of the city and its spaces as the protagonists wander through the city. The protagonist of my story is Cléo, from the film "Cléo de 5 à 7" by Agnès Varda. In the film, Cleo walks in Paris under the oppressive gaze of passers-by. Constantly observed, Cleo cannot escape the eyes that are fixed on her. In my collages the roles are reversed and the observed becomes the observer. Cleo's eyes are fixed in turn on the object of her desires.
If Cleo remains a constant throughout the four vignettes, the desired man changes his appearance with each verse. In the first vignette he is played by Marcello from Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita (1960). In the second vignette, a zoom on the face of the mysterious man reveals the man reading a book by Edgar Poe in François Truffaut's Vivre sa Vie (1962). In the third vignette, we find the hero of the Soviet film Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964). In this film, Volodya spends a day walking around the city in pursuit of the woman of his dreams, only to be left on the metro platform. Here it is Volodya who is pursued, and it is now his turn to leave.