“A forest where animals seem to live in harmony. In the distance, a dialogue between a man and a woman. In the distance, a war is raging.” This is how Muriel Montini summarizes her latest film. Not far, nearby, the animals. We only see them, or almost: bears, hinds, stags, boars, nocturnal visions of a patch of forest in Romania, captured by the director on a bear watching site. Almost, because the film opens with a painting by Poussin – Spring or The Earthly Paradise – and ends with an aquatint by Goya – The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters . At the beginning of the film, the night shots in Romania call to mind the earthly paradises of Baroque painting, in which all the animals of Creation coexisted in a single landscape. In this camera-lit night, we marvel at the sight of bears and deer in the same shot. But the monster is right there, nearby: it is Putin, with his toneless, empty voice of a petty crime official. We can hear his wars in the distance. Heaven, hell. At an equal distance from the two, Muriel Montini has composed her own version of Purgatory: the conversation on the phone of a couple grappling with the ordinary snags of relationships: jealousy, narcissism, frustration. Right in the middle of the film, Jean-Luc Godard appears, via the beautiful eulogy written at the time of his death by his friend Jean Narboni. Why Godard? Because, as the critic says, love and war were his only subjects. The tribute is poignant, but it is more, much more than a tribute: a continuation. As JLG used to do, the director of Je suis une heroine périphérique (FID 2021) produces cinema, poetry and thought out of whatever comes to hand: scraps from a previous film, salvaged images and sounds, beloved texts and paintings. The rumble of war stirs the animals, the pains of love tint their world with the colors of human affect. But in another night, nearby, something Edenic keeps on dawning. Cyril Neyrat