Signs

The basis of this story might be from a D.W. Griffith film: a woman waits endlessly for her fisherman husband to return from the sea. One of her sons insists on searching for his father, while the other encounters the world as a series of puzzles to be deciphered. The search for narrative answers is thus converted into a search for signs which resonate in the world. Green is the director of prize-winning features Tous les nuits (2001) and Le Monde vivant (2003), and this film was regarded by many critics as one of the highlights of Cannes in 2006. Green has written that “all of my films and my writing express the idea that the world has a meaning but that its mystery remains always impenetrable.” Hence the importance of art as a system of signs which point toward larger mysteries. The cryptic dialogue and geometrically precise decoupage provide no answers but rather, immerse us in this great abstraction we call the real world.

Sweetly enigmatic, exquisitely poised and with a fascinating ability to fabricate rhymes and metaphors that are at once verbal and visual. … Les Signes is as precisely hewn and as resonantly strange as a Mallarmé sonnet. A true aesthete as well as a subtle farceur, Green continues to be French cinema's great undiscovered treasure.

Jonathan Romney, Sight and Sound