Jean Streff
Jean Streff is an essayist, novelist, screenwriter, and director. He notably directed Marie Trintignant in *La Groupie* and received the Grand Prize for Best Screenplay at the Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival for *La Dernière héroïne*. He is the author of the cult classic *Le Masochisme au cinéma* (Henri Veyrier – 1978 and 1990, Rouge profond – 2021) and won the Sade Prize for his *Traité du fétichisme à l'usage des jeunes générations* (Denoël – 2005), translated into Japanese with over a thousand illustrations. His latest novel, *En souvenir de demain*, was published by Douro in 2021.
Jean Streff,
In memory of tomorrow
Romantic transports
It's always the lovesick souls who slip into forbidden beds where the princess laughs once eros has run its course. And Jean Streff chooses one of them to stick her tongue out at the proper sort where the mouth hangs when such a hero succumbs to the cinematic exploits of Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, Grace Kelly, and a few other not-so-dull western heroes.
The central character—though somewhat eccentric—remains strange: he's obsessed with the idea of having been born at midnight. Which is, after all, an idea like any other. But is it a good reason to take a train at the same time?
And not just any train: since it leads nowhere—which can be anywhere. On such a Jarmusch-esque train, the hero finds himself in the company of a deranged conductor, the ghost of Edith Piaf, and a clown—as sad as one would expect. Which is not the case with this rail movie.
In his own way, he goes off the rails, because, leaving the Gare de Lyon, he traverses both the idyllic France and the America of his childhood. It's enough to make you lose your bearings, where time loses its compass. He's more of a hindrance than a help on this train where no one ever sleeps and where ghosts become a kind of vampire.
In this teeming mass of stories and confessions, as the convoy moves forward, the fiction is doubled by other means of transport that lead to erotic pursuits in a kind of flashback, "a memory of tomorrow." These recollections sometimes return with the appetite of jackals. As for feelings, everything remains uncertain, even if the "sex stories" the hero recounts don't amuse anyone.
There remains the problem of a love affair where lives are ghosts, lived in the name of the one through whom it all began and who has just died under suspicious circumstances: the mother. She loved her lost son more, no doubt, than it would have been reasonable to acknowledge. Which, for the falsely lying novelist, is the most wonderful of pretexts for utter delusion.
By constantly mixing things up, everything ends up where it must have gotten tangled up in untimely detours. Through such a journey, Plato's cave itself becomes a chimerical abyss: against its walls, the confession of maternal murder takes on a particular kind of licking.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Jean Streff, In memory of tomorrow, Editions Douro, coll. Le Bleu-Turquin, Chaumont, 2021, 166 p. — €18.00. New paragraph
I will go through the dark streets, slitting throats
your ghosts
"The crowd parted as he passed, as if before the footsteps of a prophet. I rushed forward. I saw the throat cleanly sliced by the razor blade. I saw the head partially severed from the beast's body, blood spurting from the arteries like jets of semen and fouling the stream water with great gushes. And I stood there in that hoop of fire where lions sometimes hesitate to jump during their training acts. I stood there, and I watched the deep gash on the neck where the spurts of blood subsided, the face now reflecting an incredible melancholy. I stood there and wished that moment would never end."
In memory of tomorrow
After learning of his mother's death under suspicious circumstances, a man, obsessed with the idea of having been born at midnight, boards a train at the same time from Paris-Gare-de-Lyon. A train with no destination, its only passengers a mad and aggressive conductor, the ghost of Edith Piaf, and a sad, melancholic clown. The night train seems to travel through time, dreams, and fantasies, as the man relives entire sections of his past. But where is this old steam locomotive taking him?
