The face is instantly familiar to us. An old man that we would like to have for a grandfather. Touching and amusing, the wrinkles dug like furrows, the mischievous eye, the rare and shaggy hair, the mustache yellowed by nicotine. This pace which we guess was powerful, became more fragile, tottering. Hands shaking, big belly overflowing from the T-shirt. Jim Harrison, giant of contemporary American literature, appears to us damaged, and nevertheless joyful.
Poet philosopher a little tramp, mocking old epicurean worn out by the excesses and accidents of life, “Gargantua Yankee” … The hoarse breath of the voice died out in March 2016. Six months after the first part of the shooting of Alone the Earth is eternal.
It is a perfectly finished, intense and peaceful film that François Busnel and Adrien Soland brought back from their stay. Three weeks of discussions, meals, fishing trips, journeys through the majestic landscapes of America during which, day and night, Jim Harrison never stopped talking.
wild america
At ease and confident, at home, in his house in Montana, the writer did not balk. He let the camera follow him as he was, at sunrise and sunset, motionless for a long time facing the wide open spaces, patient on his boat waiting for it to bite, laughing when it comes to trapping snakes. Sometimes silent before the beauty of the world.
Because the author of Legends of the Fall, of North Michigan, of Dalva keeps intact his wonder at this wild America that each of his novels describes. Jim Harrison tells it like no one else. “The scenery can take away all the sorrows,” he says at the start of the film. A film which, by alternating close shots and very wide shots in “scope”, manages to make man and landscape inseparable.
At the wheel of his car that takes us from Montana to Arizona, where he owns a ranch, the writer unfolds his life as he sees fit, is annoyed at having sometimes been compared to Hemingway (“I have nothing in common with his manly nonsense, and then he was drunk all the time”), dwells on the greed, hatred and lust for power that led America to the worst atrocities: Indians, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…
In the late summer of 2015, “Big Jim” stands at peace in the wild world and fears nothing. Not even death – “It happens to everyone. And then there are 90 billion galaxies, so anything is possible! “. It has long been accompanied by this phrase which he quoted in his Memoirs, In the margin: “Only the Earth is eternal”. She comes from the Sioux and gives her title to the film. Jim Harrison offers his last breath here. As a final tribute to what he loved so much.
