Les travailleurs de la mer

Salt crusts the eyelids; gales scour the cheekbones; gulls wheel like torn paper above a granite outcrop that might once have been France. In this tidal palimpsest, Léonard Antoine and Victor Hugo exhume Gilliatt—no mere fisherman, but a sinewy myth stitched from kelp and moonlight—who rows daily into a pewter void, harvesting the sea’s indifferent generosity while nursing a clandestine furnace for Déruchette, the porcelain-silent ward of the local rector. Between documentary stasis and whispered fabulation, the camera lingers on calloused palms splitting under invisible barbs of salt, on hemp nets sagging with silver that flash like aborted constellations. Déruchette, glimpsed through lace curtains or framed by hydrangeas, drifts across the narrative like a half-remembered psalm; her laughter ricochets against slate roofs, igniting in Gilliatt a perilous resolve. When winter tightens its iron collar, a storm-battered schooner is impaled on a reef known as the Douvre—an obsidian dragon’s jaw—and only a solitary soul can salvage its cargo before insurers and vultures descend. Thus Gilliatt volunteers, shoving off in a worm-eaten skiff, surrendering to the water’s rabid sermon. What follows is not maritime adventure in any Melvillean register but a slow crucifixion: days calcify into weeks, weeks into a lunar eternity, as the fisherman confronts devilfish swirling like ink in the arteries of the planet, octopuses whose tentacles write hieroglyphs of dread on his sternum, and tidal rips that yawn with cathedral-sized hunger. Meanwhile ashore, Déruchette’s silhouette dissolves into rumor; the village, half-submerged in fog, gossips about a dowry of guineas and a cousin from Saint-Malo. When at last Gilliatt returns—barnacled, blood-sheened, dragging the rescued engine through cobbled streets—he discovers that love, like tide, has already withdrawn, leaving only a necklace of foam and a note folded like a gull’s wing. The film closes on a dusk verging on ultraviolet: the fisherman shoves out again, alone, into a horizon that swallows both ship and sun, while voice-over fragments of Hugo’s verse rise and disperse like salt spray, reminding us that every worker of the sea ultimately works for death, paid in the small coin of phosphorescence.