In ‘Retour avant 15 heures,’ Gaël Lépingle Deciphers a Father

Gaël Lépingle begins “Retour avant 15 heures” by examining pages of mathematical formulas with his young nephew. Neither of them can decipher the equations, and the film does not expect viewers to do so either. Yet the camera lingers over the notebooks, treating the cryptic lines as a final language left behind by the filmmaker’s father.

The father, who has died, became a mathematics professor and probability researcher at a university in Orléans. His son’s docu-fiction brings him back through the traces he kept, from school notebooks and old mathematics lessons to documents recording the details of daily life in a suburban housing estate.

Those records describe ordinary routines through lists of small actions and minor events, without ranking one part of life above another. The film places these details alongside the mathematical formulas, allowing the everyday and the incomprehensible to speak to each other.

The result is described as both burlesque and deeply moving. Lépingle does not try to decode his father completely. Instead, he films the mystery in the hope of reading it aloud one last time before it disappears.