Review: A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray by Dominique Barbéris

Dominique Barbéris’s ‘A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray’ asks, if you are an imaginative and whimsical child do you grow to live an unfulfilled life as an adult?

Set amidst a period of autumnal transition, Barbéris presents two sisters who embody the paced and reflective nature of the season as they confront and contemplate their lives.

Now grown and separated, Jane in Paris and Claire Marie in the western suburb Ville-d’Avray, Claire’s geographical departure from her sister only buries her in a deeper and more intense suffocation.

Known as the devoted doctor’s wife, Claire Marie is consumed by the domestic regularity of the paced and lethargic rhythm of Ville-d’Avray. However, on a reluctant visit to her detached sister, Jane discovers a remarkable event that pierces the image of Claire Marie’s contentment.

Kept secret for years, Claire Marie reveals to her sister the story of a chance encounter she had with the luring and mysterious figure of Marc Hermann. Hermann presents to Claire Marie a moment within which she can push through the boundary of regularity. In following a strange impulse Claire Marie is led into a dangerous game, one that leaves her reaching for answers.

Barbéris’s use of narrative is powerful as Jane’s reflective passages beautifully articulate the pain and melancholic nature of adulthood. Barbéris consciously weaves together images of childhood with the present, revealing adulthood as a fatality: a time of loss and reckoning with banality. Childhood, however, is magic.

When Claire Marie states that “on Sundays, you think about life” it highlights how we are entrenched in the past and our expectations. Maybe the freedom to dream as a child is a trap, a trap that consumes us into adulthood as we try to capture and truly live out those fantasies. The presentation of the sisters’ struggle deftly illustrates how, as adults, we must wrestle with the continued presence of disappointment.