Gary himself takes us along with him into the never-ending journey of his life, from his birth in Moscow or Vilnius, nobody knows, to the Big Sur beach, where La Promesse de l’aube opens and closes, the place he saw as an imaginary extreme.
Romain Gary was a many-facetted character: a novelist, a diplomat, a Companion of the Liberation, a movie director. Our intention here is not to describe in its very details the agitated life of that extraordinary man. The film tells the novel of a man who, in every circumstance, was carried away by his convictions. In love with women, in love with his mother, in love with the General de Gaulle, he hated racism, the misery of the poor. He fought for the Civil Rights and for ecology. A kind of chameleon, pulled this way and that between Russia, Poland, England and France, he could speak any language and knew every country. The Hollywood studios had no secret for him.
The unifying element of this long tour, the issue that is central to this quest is that of identity. In his life, his work, even in his physical appearance, Gary never stopped changing, superimposing faces, names, identities, ending up writing his life like one of the pieces of his work. The progression of our tale, the transitions between one chapter and the next are going to be constantly boosted by this interrogation.
The witnesses we met in France, in Switzerland and in the United States echo this question, each in their own way. They bring the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that is never going to be finished. A lot of archives showing Gary at different stages of his life help making of this film a live and kicking portrait, in which humour and emotion mingle in order to give of the man who wrote La Promesse de l’aube a picture loyal to his complexity and his inner contradictions.