Fifteen filmless years have passed since Content (if we ignore Petit’s minute contribution to the omnibus The Film That Buys the Cinema, 2014). But in a certain way, Petit was always busy with it, as Emma Matthews and he were raising their son, Louis, who suffers from a gruesomely debilitating form of epilepsy that wiped out his whole memory of childhood.
Obviously, they weren’t thinking about cinema while doing their best as parents, and they surely didn’t see Louis as the future protagonist of a film; and Discontent, as D Is for Distance was originally to be called, was anyway supposed to be something quite different: a paranoid politics speculation not unlike the performance project Museum of Loneliness presents Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream (2014). But then it became another road movie, this time Finland-bound, during which the parents remember the tribulations of their son’s younger years through video they taped while creating together new memories in reality as well as on data cards for a future unknown.
Many other subjects get mentioned, but what one remembers most in the end is that small family trying so hard to live decently in a world that has turned pernicious.
Olaf Möller