Fragments of a Life Loved (2024) ‘Hot Docs’ Movie Review

Early in the film, director Chloe Barreau wonders what she pines more for: love or being loved. The answer may be uncertain, but love is the driving engine of her life; it is only fitting that she turns the gaze inward in her sharp-eyed, unassumingly frank documentary, “Fragments Of A Life Loved.” Since her teens, Chloe has recorded her many romances, both with men and women.

The documentary brings together several of her exes as they recount the short, passionate spells with her and Chloe’s own private archive, comprising intimate diaristic snatches of videos, photographs, and exchanges of letters. It is to Chloe’s credit that she is able to mine blazing, often unflattering honesty from the assembled recollections. Albeit this excavation of self from the perspective of others does get to unpleasant places, the heady allure Chloe wields or wielded is persistently underlined.

The exes confess being discomfited by Chloe’s constant tendency to film everything. They point out a certain fetishism was embedded in the habit of relentless documentation, suggesting objectification in the camera’s gaze. Moments of intimacy didn’t just exist in themselves, thereby allowing for a possibility of retrieval. What would have been a fleeting flicker of impressions got to extend beyond a limited temporal confine.

She needed to seduce as much as she needed to breathe, one of the exes says. That she is obsessed with love is an underlying refrain, even spelled out. Someone says that when they look back on the relationship, they feel they were drunk through it. She transgressed all codes of a relationship because she believed in her impulses so much she went and ‘fully lived’ every single love story that presented itself before her. Does she even pause to consider the consequences of her often reckless actions? This question is raised frequently, countered with the implication of Chloe’s hunger for romance that is so furiously energetic and unstoppable that she skips, stopping to sift through shards of what she may have shattered in pursuit of the next adventure. To fulfill her tirelessly romanticized notion of love, as many put it, she lied her way through several relationships simultaneously.

Fragments of a Life Loved (2024) ‘Hot Docs’ Movie Review — A still from “Fragments of a Life Loved” (2024)

“Fragments of A Life Loved” also puts a sharp focus on the perception and position of queerness as it held in the 1990s. Even if sexual freedom buzzed in the air, taboos around queerness were still very functional. To exercise their liberation, queer individuals were constantly on the move, escaping to bigger cities. Chloe thrust herself into romances with women but wasn’t steadily comfortable being associated with them at least initially. She would impose secrecy, assuring many women almost parallelly that they were among her earliest experiences of exploring her sexuality, whereas the falsehood in her statements gradually came to dawn upon them.

The portrait of Chloe that eventually surfaces is of her as someone hurtling through life and love with a reckless thirst. There was an ‘unease’ and ‘ambiguity’ to her. Someone asserts that you wouldn’t exactly know when a relationship with her actually started, even though she wilfully gave you the reins to terminate it. The most undeniably fascinating quality of the film is how it handles richly contrasting attitudes to the past while admitting a seed of commonality. The past is a mysterious continent, one of them remarks, cautioning against being pulled away by the tide of nostalgia.

Another cherishes the actuality of the archive in that it is a testament to the existence of love that once was. Seeming contradictions abound in the film, in the reminiscences others have of Chloe. One of the women starts out by conceding gratitude to Chloe for how she made her feel seen. It was like having your existence finally validated and heard. Very few are capable of eliciting this. Chloe was one such who could. The woman is thankful to her for granting the boost of vital self-affirmation that has helped her steer her life in fundamental ways, even long after the breakup.

She wanted to seize the moment, one of the exes says. She fiercely ‘clutched’ onto love. Memories may fade away; Chloe Barreau’s “Fragments of a Life Loved” is a tender reinstatement of their existence, enshrining all the bursts of emotion that might have otherwise been consigned to oblivion.