La maison dans laquelle (2009)

   

Dans la Maison, vous allez perdre vos repères, votre nom et votre vie d'avant. Dans la Maison, vous vous ferez des amis, vous vous ferez des ennemis. Dans la Maison, vous mènerez des combats, vous perdrez des guerres. Dans la Maison, vous connaîtrez l'amour, vous connaîtrez la peur, vous découvrirez des endroits dont vous ne soupçonniez pas l'existence, et même quand vous serez seul, ça ne sera jamais vraiment le cas. Dans la Maison, aucun mur ne peut vous arrêter, le temps ne s'écoule pas toujours comme il le devrait, et la Loi y est impitoyable. Dans la Maison, vous atteindrez vos dix-huit ans transformé à jamais et effrayé à l'idée de devoir la quitter.

Ensorcelante évocation de l'adolescence, La Maison dans laquelle est un chant d'amour à cet âge ingrat et bienheureux, à ses exaltations et ses tragédies, au sentiment de frustration et de toute-puissance qui le traverse. Mariam Petrosyan a réussi à créer un univers bariolé, vivant et réaliste, pétri de cette nostalgie et de cet émerveillement que nous avons tous au fond de nous et qui fait que, parfois, nous refusons de grandir et d'affronter la brutalité du monde qu'on appelle la réalité. 

*******************

In the House, you will lose your bearings, your name, and your former life. In the House, you will make friends, you will make enemies. In the House, you will fight battles, you will lose wars. In the House, you will know love, you will know fear, you will discover places you never knew existed, and even when you are alone, it will never truly be alone. In the House, no wall can stop you, time does not always flow as it should, and the Law is merciless. In the House, you will reach your eighteenth birthday forever changed and terrified at the thought of having to leave it.

A bewitching evocation of adolescence, The House in Which is a love song to this awkward yet blissful age, to its exaltations and tragedies, to the feelings of frustration and omnipotence that permeate it. Mariam Petrosyan has succeeded in creating a colorful, vibrant and realistic universe, imbued with that nostalgia and wonder that we all have deep inside and that sometimes makes us refuse to grow up and face the brutality of the world we call reality.

“We think of a sort of great Russian novel revised and corrected by a melancholic Stephen King or a surly Lewis Carroll.”

— Lire

“What charm distills these few thousand enchanted and very dark, hypnotic pages!”

— Télérama

“La Maison dans laquelle is one of those book-worlds where we sink, where we get lost, but it is precisely by letting marginal adolescents live and wander, mistreated by fate, that Mariam Petrosyan succeeds in capturing the essence of this intense, furious age, conducive to excessive feelings and dreams, perfect for literature.”

— Le Monde

In the House, you will lose your bearings, your name and your previous life. In the House, you will make friends, you will make enemies. In the House you will fight battles, you will lose wars. In the House, you will know love, you will know fear, you will discover places you never knew existed, and even when you are alone, it will never really be. In the House, no wall can stop you, time does not always flow as it should, and the Law is merciless. In the House, you will turn eighteen forever changed and afraid of having to leave it.

The House, this building lost in the middle of vacant lots and blocks of buildings, with its three floors and its white paint which has turned to a dirty gray, is a sort of boarding school for different children: dilapidated and dented of all kinds, whether they are in wheelchairs or crawling, the House is what brings them together. It becomes their world. The presence of adults — teachers, educators and parents — is discreet and even undesirable, and their world, the Outside, a place without precise contours, is feared. Every seven years, the oldest children will have to join this Outside, not without apprehension. But in the meantime, the House is their home, their playground and their battlefield. Within its walls, each resident is given a new name and assigned to a group. The children then create their own laws, transgress them, structure or destructure time, invent and transmit their own traditions and customs, fabricate legends, decide on their founding myths, and in the meantime, eat, drink and smoke in their dormitories more or less less filthy. The House is this microcosm as codified as it is phantasmagorical, between an obligatory passage and an eternally suspended moment.

A bewitching evocation of childhood and adolescence, La Maison dans laquelle is a fantastic love song to this thankless and blissful age, to its exaltations and its tragedies, to the feeling of frustration and omnipotence that runs through it. Mariam Petrosyan has succeeded in creating a colorful, lively and poetic universe, steeped in this nostalgia and this wonder that we all have deep within us and which means that, sometimes, we refuse to grow up and face the brutality of the world that we call reality.

All the subtitles I've worked on are in my opensubtitles account:

.en/search/...9/a-mysqld