My Life and Times with Antonin Artaud

Gerard Mordillat's My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud, is dominated by Sami Frey's astonishingly intense performance as the famed French poet and intellectual, by turns shocking and magnificent, cruel and sensitive. The experimental narrative takes the form of a fictional diary kept by Prevel, an ambitious young poet. He eagerly awaits Artaud's return to Paris after nine years' incarceration in an asylum, and is determined to make his mentor's acquaintance. As Prevel's initial role as procurer of drugs evolves into that of companion and disciple too, the two men's complex relationship sheds much light on both Artaud and the artistic milieu of 1940's Paris, wonderfully evoked by François Cantonné's sensual black and white cinematography. As fiercely intellectual as its subject matter, My Life and Times... sheds fresh light on the effects of pain and creativity, depicting the hallucinatory sensibility of a man who was ravaged for most of his life by the pain of cancer. Like the man himself, this tribute to him is both tortuous and magnificent.

Reviewed by Monika Maurer

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