L'Art de la chute

Early 1970s, in East Hampton, a seaside resort of the New York bourgeoisie. Big Edie, 79, and her daughter Little Edie, 56, live in a huge, crumbling mansion: for several years, they've occupied just one room, along with dozens of cats and a few raccoons. In this room, cluttered from floor to ceiling, they eat, read, dance, reminisce, rarely clean, and wonder how they put up with each other.

Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale have left their mark on the American imagination: Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin, immortalized in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, they embody the fall of an aristocracy that thought itself invincible. With these images of isolation and excess, Sara Stridsberg speaks to us of the dysfunctional relationships that can exist between mother and daughter, of what holds us back and of love in spite of everything.