Persécution is a hard movie to describe accurately. It's the story of Daniel (Romain Duris), a loft renovator in Paris. Daniel is inordinately important to the people in his life, whom he mostly treats with what seems like hostility.
He has an unstable relationship with his very independent girlfriend Sonia (Charlotte Gainsbourg). A stranger (Jean-Hugues Anglade) begins to stalk him, although in extraordinarily creative ways and without any threat or malicious intent. But the details of the plot really don't matter much. It's not really a story; it's an experience.
This (like every earlier Patrice Chéreau movie I've seen - which are only L'homme blessé (which starred Jean-Hugues Anglade in his luminous youth), Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, and Son frère, but they're three of the most memorable movies I've ever seen) deeply challenges its audience in ways other directors' movies never do.
It's impossible to watch a Chéreau movie without a completely open mind, free of every normal expectation: that you will understand it, that you will be able to empathize with ANY of the characters, that you will even know whether you like it or not.
Chéreau, either intentionally or unintentionally, ALWAYS made movies that force the viewer to surrender control, to step outside everything familiar, to go wherever he leads without questioning where or why. Watching a Chéreau movie is more life-changing, more consciousness-expanding, more iconoclastic than entertaining.
I LOVE that kind of challenge, I LOVE that kind of movie, and only Chéreau ever demanded so much from an audience. If you don't WANT to be challenged like that, if you don't WANT your mind and your world shaken to their foundations and rebuilt by someone else, then don't bother watching this amazing movie. You'll hate it.
