Nothing seems more contrary to the contemplative slowness of Jean-Claude Rousseau's cinema than the wild rhythm of flamenco. A stay in Cadiz nevertheless inspired the author of Welcome (FID 2022) to create a form capable not only of welcoming the tremors of Andalusian dance, but also of responding to them with his own fiery choreography. We are, as in many of Rousseau's films, in a hotel room. We do not leave it, nor the unique frame that divides the space into three vertical bands. On the left, the entrance to the room through which its occupant enters and exits, looking hesitant, troubled. On the right, a frosted glass wall behind which a naked body writhes and moans – pleasure, suffering? In the center, the central panel, a white surface of appearance and disappearance, of the man's body but also of the image of a headless woman dancing flamenco. From this device, the filmmaker has taken his art of editing to a new level of freedom and fantasy thanks to the fantastic powers of superimposition. Two speeds of the same passion oppose and meet: the frenzy of a dancing body, the slow-motion consumption of the other in his glass cage. A body turned into flame, gestures of a tortured person, a drowned person, or an ecstatic lover. It is the very soul of flamenco that the film unfolds by editing the images in the shot: an exit from oneself, through which pain and pleasure are indistinguishable – provided that one burns. One can imagine that the man who enters and leaves the room has visited the museums and churches of Seville and Cadiz. That he admired the paintings of Greco and Zurbaran there, before imitating them in his glass cage. And to add, to the masterpieces of the past, a new triptych of the Passion. Cyril Neyrat