Short film 

A monodrama about extreme loneliness, in which reality intertwines with the protagonist's fictionalized world. The idea is to portray the protagonist's unstable representation of himself through a process that is analogous to the child’s ‘mirror stage’ as conceptualized by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan*. 

A film about a shattered identity in search for consistency but facing a multiplicity of ‘others’ that he sees in the mirror. About the two sides, dark and bright, of human existence: from the failure of assembling a full representation of his body/self, one creates a rich imaginary world of images and personas. It is also a focus on childhood and the process of humanization of a subject.

Theoretical background:

Lacan’s mirror stage

The mirror stage is the event through which primary identification takes place. Before this event the child experiences himself as disjointed and sees individual body parts not forming a whole that he can identify as his own image. While looking in the mirror appears a full image of the body mediated by the relationship with the mother - the first “other” - that will support his unconscious self (identification to one’s own image).  

*Jacques Lacan (13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan’s work marked the French and international intellectual landscape, with a significant impact on psychoanalysis and also continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminism and film theory. 

Screenplay

Night, dark street. He is running to his house. Very fast walking. The room - mirrors gradually emerge from the darkness. Cratylus walks around the room from the perspective of the reflections in the mirrors hanging on the walls. He walks to the window, looks at one point, lights a cigarette. He is not looking through the window but at his own reflection in the window. The internal conflict of the protagonist, lost in his own mirror reflections.

METAMORPHOSES

Monologues of Cratylus transforming into 3 different characters. There is a gradual, mental and physical deconstruction of the protagonist through the transformations. 

The analogy with the “mirror stage”: Cratylus is a fragmented being, his identity is shattered. By looking in the mirror, he reconstructs temporarily a sense of himself as a whole, but other.

Each transformation similarly, unrealistically shot - strong close-ups. 

First transformation: Looking to assemble his image - “assembles” into someone else, a version of him.

CRATYLUS

Action leads you to an outpouring of yourself.

The harshness of your flesh leads you into gestures of love towards your thigh, in a gathering of your thoughts finely sprinkled with your fruit in bloom, embalming your body, giving access to a space where your resonance faces a world ahead of the imbalances of your own rules that mislead your body with fraudulent wounds.

You want to pursue the most amazing journey with the forces you have left to live, and the tiniest freedom.

Unconditional freedom guessing the celestial conquest in shooting stars that make your vertebrae vibrate in the face of a reality whose sap nourishes your body awaiting the finitude that will raise it towards the heavens.

A life to understand, to remain in this world carried by beings too poorly known and understood.

Second transformation: Cratylus transforms into his dead mother - putting on her clothes, accentuating make-up.

MOTHER

The rigidity of your love and its mute drifts consume you in allegories when loving these women's bodies.

CRATYLUS

Your sarcastic movements preserve your moods, invite you to explore your emotion in constant pride to be found.

MOTHER

Your birth aborted my sense of humility, imposing a birdsong to the love of yesteryear finally found.

He puts more lipstick on. 

He kisses the mirror, admires the lipstick print and then tries to remove it with his fingers with quick movements. He makes a stain out of it and gives up. 

KATHARSIS

Disconnect, rage and he breaks the mirror with a fist. Blood. Destruction of mirrors. 

Inserts showing "human sculptures” - a man like a monument. Three recordings of naked Cratylus, posing with mirrors in different locations, in the aesthetics of Bernini's sculptures.

Shiny skin. Mirror reflections of selected body parts 

Frame of a child held in a mother's arms, who looks into the mirror for the first time. Frames on the mother's hands. Strong close-ups. 

The mother takes the child's hand, they touch the mirror (scene in studio - strong, unreal close-ups).  

Third transformation: into a god-like figure. The ritual.  

Cratylus arranges a new creation from the shards of mirrors, looks at himself through the broken fragments. Using the same lipstick he paints marks on his body. 

GOD

The waning hope of your heart indulges in thoughts that fly away. 

The cessation of your belongings has pronounced the disorder of your reason and the desertion of your soul. 

Deepen the paths that will put you in front of all ecstasy. Will your body devote itself to its proper movements? The flesh is finally granted. 

Forget the promises, overcome with a distraught voice the meaning of accomplishing a life, the taming of your own incantatory madness, at your will.

Breaking, change of light. The shards of the mirrors refract the 'divine' arcs of light. 

Cratylus dresses and leaves. 

Outdoor scenes shot at night.