Both oblique and intensely intimate, sometimes uncomfortably so, La rencontre is the record of a love affair in which the lovers' faces remain unseen. Instead we see a fish, a pebble, a leaf, a watch, small objects that have become talismans of the couple's bond; they whisper about these things to each other and to us, as close as if the microphone were on the pillow. Cavalier had been involved with Françoise Widhoff for about three months when he began shooting this material on Hi-8 video. The details of the film are particular to the two of them, yet they hint at larger things: how objects and creatures become vessels for emotion, how love is inherently bound up with mortality, foolishness with grace. We watch the filmmaker gather images for his beloved, waiting for some kind of alchemy to take place. A medicine tablet dissolving in a glass comes to seem animate, possessed of something like a soul.
—Juliet Clark