It is an unexpected tender map offered by Romain Potocki’s bright film, featuring a young couple resolutely resilient after being hit each by a stroke that brought them together.
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It’s a beautiful novel, it’s a beautiful story… In 2015 and 2017, Louis Gustin and Elise Mathy were students. She in medicine, he in European business law. One day, they were struck by a stroke (stroke). Elise was 27 years old, Louis 24. On February 27, 2015, he collapsed on the terrace of a Warsaw coffee (where he was in Erasmus). On February 10, 2017, she could not finish her daily jogging to prepare the Paris marathon.
At the end of their long respective postoperative tunnels, both sought to meet other young people in the same situation as them. And met. Not on the holiday highway, as in Michel Fugain’s song, but on that of resilience. It was in a Facebook speech group called “avc young survivors “. Since then, they have not left each other. “Will someone be able to love me again? We necessarily ask ourselves this question and in the end, when it happens to you, you realize that everything is possible,” says Elise, a broad smile and sparkling eyes.
Another documentary on the disabled? Yet another pensum on the way of the cross of those who claim the “right to indifference” as much as to difference? Yes and no.
scenario in four seasons
This is a trivial everyday story told by this pretty film by Romain Potocki, on music by Vincent Delerm. Banal but bright. A slice of marked life of laughter and shouting, good and bad moments, failures and successes …
The scenario in four chapters, in four seasons, punctuates the ups and downs of this next life. His bets, his challenges, which Elise day after day – today endocrinologist in Pitié -Salpêtrière in Paris – and Louis, who finally won his CDI at the Ministry of Solidarity, Health and Prevention, where he has makes his aphasia an asset in his function of disability mission manager.
A life nicely staged by the graphic animation of Yasmine Tashk, inspired by the dream made by Louis of a spider who relentlessly weave his canvas, illustration, he says, of the incessant fight that he and his companion lead daily. The “1:15 p.m.” presented by Laurent Delahousse, Sunday on France 2, is an ideal setting to convey the message of Elise and Louis, in the wake of the Sunday newspaper. Because message there is. Very quickly, the couple understood that he could not be satisfied with his beautiful story, which is not a novel.
In August 2019, they embarked on a road trip around Europe, to meet other young victims of this AVC, which strikes more than 140,000 people each year in France, 10 % are under 45 years old -First cause of physical disability in adults, second cause of dementia (after Alzheimer’s disease) and mortality.
Their last challenge, this year: go around Lake Geneva, by bike and on foot, after being received in the UN in Geneva. “We are not going to focus on the past but think about the future, to live the present,” says Elise, who wants to believe that, “ultimately, life is now better than before”.
Pretty irony of history: chance wanted them to be one and the other with hemiparisia (a paralysis on one side), Elise on the left side, Louis on the right side. “This allows them to take themselves by the hand,” concludes with Roman poetry Potocki.