After a fight with the Camorra Control gang, wandering youngsters Toussaint and Nixon find a refuge in the Bronx, one of Abidjan’s ghettos. Numerous hands ask for work through bars. This image is the starting point of Bronx-Barbès which portrays an African youth with no perspective, torn between its culture and its desire to live through a western lifestyle. The references to the western world are numerous in Abidjan’s boroughs, in the clothes, in the language -which mixes French and English words-, in the nicknames of the “ghetthomans” –Clinton, Tyson, Las Vegas, Scarface, Chirac– but this world his ruled by African traditions, the “old-fathers” teach the “sons”, the warrior’s image, which is the constant reference, the image of the heart, who is supposed to be as big as his host his brave…

After anthropological studies, Eliane de Latour worked on documentaries and Bronx-Barbès is the result of her way to approach fiction, nourishing it on reality. If the story is the classical initiation of a youngster in gangs, it only seems to work as an excuse for the description of this youth, these “ghettomans” who want to build themselves a legend through the “sciences”, the name they give to all the tricks and thieveries that make them live. It gives a special taste to the film, though built on a well-known canvas it sometimes looks like a pure documentary. Spontaneous non-professional actors, moments of ordinary life that looks like stolen images, the lines are blurred between what is fiction and what could just be reality. Everything is fiction, based on real stories, but we rarely have such an impression of truth. This feeling comes from the preparatory work of the director, inherited from her anthropological background. It’s after a year in Abidjan’s ghettos that Eliane de Latour wrote her screenplay, with the collaboration of the “ghettomans” she worked with. The DVD that has just been released in France testifies of her work through a one-hour long documentary. It shows the actors being cast, all coming from the streets, we can see them with their families and the way the film changed their lives or not. It is the perfect socio-anthropological of the film.

A gangster film looking like a documentary, a documentary in a beautiful cinemascope which looks like a thriller, Bronx-Barbès is tense and never shies away from violence and death. Immersion in the ghettos of a “third world” metropolis like we’ve hardly seen, faraway from the way a film like City of God deals with a similar subject, Bronx-Barbès is a fascinating cinematographical act.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Bronx-Barbès DVD.

The Passenger (1975) by Michelangelo Antonioni.
“I’ve seen again The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni, which I hadn’t seen for a long time and which I found on DVD, without looking for it. It’s a wonderful film. I won’t comment the fantastic imagery, its sensoriality, but there is a great technical freedom in the narration, in the use of flashbacks, in the way sound play between different times of the reality and creates bridges between them. It fascinated me and the filming is full of virtuosity. A paradoxical virtuosity because it is extraordinarily modest. The long shot at the end is one the most famous shots in contemporary cinema history and there is a great modesty in it. Antonioni’s virtuosity is never thrown at the audience’s face, there is no violence in it. It’s perfect.”

More information about The Passenger.

Pierre Trividic learnt cinema at French cinema school IDHEC (now called FEMIS) after art history studies. He wrote screenplays for Patrice Chéreau (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, Intimacy) and Pascale Ferrand, which earned him lately a Cesar (French Academy Award) along with her for their adaptation of Lady Chatterley. He is, with Patrick Mario Bernard, the director of Ballroom, and L’autre, their latest film, which earned Dominique Blanc the Venice Film Festival Interpretation Prize in 2008.

A producer for the French companies Agat Films and Ex-Nihilo, which he co-founded, Patrick Sobelman follows the careers of authors like Lucas Belvaux (the Trilogy, The Right of the Weakest), Solveig Anspach (Stormy Weather, Back Soon, Battle Cries), Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Innocence), Marina de Van or Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic (Ballroom, L’autre). He tells us about the production of L’autre and about his forthcoming projects.

How did Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic first present you L’autre?
It’s a nice story. We had made Ballroom together, the film was in the Cesars box-set (sent to all the people who vote) and one day I receive a phone call by Dominique Blanc, with whom I worked on the Trilogy by Lucas Belvaux, she called me and said “I’ve seen Ballroom, which is extraordinary, if they want to propose me something one day I’ll be glad to do it”. I called Pierre and Patrick, with whom we had talked about Dominique and they were delighted. They made me read the book by Annie Ernaux later, we talked about it a bit and we asked Dominique Blanc to read it thinking that if she was interested we would make the film. She read the book, she met Pierre and Patrick, who told her about the way they were thinking to adapt it, and she accepted with enthusiasm. Without her the film would have never been made.

Did you had difficulties to finance the film?
When you choose singular projects you always have difficulties and refusals. The main difficulty was that people did not see the film in the script they read, they did not see how spectacular it could be. It’s deep but it’s also a pleasure for the senses, for eyes and ears. Some people saw this potential but I had difficulties making some people realize it. It was the main problem for L’autre, an intimidating script people were not sure to fully understand. In general, the difficulties come from the darkness of the themes, which are thought to be not commercial enough, not for TV, not sellable internationally…

You work with directors with strong visual universes, like Lucile Hadzihalilovic or Marina de Van, where does this taste for images comes from?
I never thought about it that way. I like the films that I see to be singular, to make me feel I never saw something like it before. I’m very interested by style, these authors are people I admire for their work on the filming. All the stories have already been told so the question is “how this film is going to be different from the others, who dealt with the same subject?”. And as it is about seeing images and hearing sounds, the question is “what do we see and what do we hear?”. An eighty-minute shot is only interesting if it tells something.

Ne te retourne pas, Marina de Van’s new film is supposed to be finished, when will it be released?
It’s being finished, it’s being mixed. The release date will depend from a little festival that takes place on the French Riviera in spring…

What about Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s project?
We’re looking for money to make it, it is a co-production between France and Spain, we will shoot in Spanish in Spain, we hope to start it this autumn. Lucile just received a price from Japanese channel NHK for her script.

Read L’autre review.

Anne-Marie, a social worker, has decided to finally live her life after fifteen years of marriage. She is now in a relationship with Alex, who would like to live as a couple, but Anne-Marie no longer wants to commit. When he leaves her for another woman, the world around Anne-Marie slowly cracks and shifts.

Inspired by the novel L’occupation by Annie Ernaux, L’autre (literaly: The Other One) by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic shakes off the restrictions of adaptations, sucking the substance from the book so that it that nourishes pure cinematographic material. The heroine’s mental states are translated to screen by the way they deform her view of the world. As soon as she starts being obsessed by the identity of her rival, Anne-Marie, slipping into a form of paranoia, sees the world in terms of these questions of identity that give everything meaning. As one of the characters says, the fantastic can only emerge if you leave room for it. As she loses her grip, Anne-Marie opens a door that lets it in. Signs keep appearing and everything makes sense. “What type of woman am I?” Anne-Marie asks Alex. This otherness, which is initially focused on the age of her rival – the same as hers – slowly manifests itself as a double. Who am I? What image do other people have of me? Am I who I think I am or the person others see? In the constant flow of cities – roads, subway stations, shopping mall corridors – the individual does not exist and is only a “type” of man or woman.

A brilliant study of the mechanisms of jealousy and paranoid vision, L’autre sits squarely on the shoulders of Dominique Blanc for whom the film was written and without whom it would never have been made. Charming, sensual, dark, terrifying, gentle or violent, she is Anne-Marie in her every move. She gives life to a character whose universality is reinforced by the many facets she plays on, making it impossible to classify her. Her breathtaking performance is sustained by the directors who give her a rare showcase for expression. Directors of the remarkable film Ballroom, with L’autre Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic prove again that they are among the most unusual and fascinating actors in French cinema, that rarely demonstrates such confidence of means. More than through the dialogues - which are never redundant - it is the attention paid to the nature and texture of image and sound that Anne-Marie’s mental journey is portrayed. Framing, lighting, superb shots of the city, sound and soundtrack, editing choices that sometimes reveal the thoughts whose jolts they mirror; the film material is measured and chosen carefully. It always makes sense. Visually sublime, the fragmented approach of L’autre tells us more about the world than any naturalist undertaking. The world is fashioned by the way each person looks at it and only exists through looking. A fascinating object, L’autre was conceived as a sensorial experience. It invites us to put on new glasses to look at the world in a light that is true and always incarnate.

Francis Chérasse

Read the interview with Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic.
More information about Ballroom

What sparked your desire to adapt L’occupation?
Patrick Mario Bernard: Of course it started with reading the book, but it happened by chance, with no real intentions. Something happened while I was reading it. I imagined the story developing an underlying fantasy theme that I thought would be interesting to highlight. I soon talked to my partner and asked him to read it. We talked about it a lot and that’s how things kicked off. It fitted in with our long-term desire to work with Dominique Blanc. We thought it was probably the ideal time to offer her something. We asked her to read the book and we gave her an outline of what we wanted to do. Then we met Annie Ernaux to get the adaptation rights to her book. She accepted, for the first time, after seeing our earlier films and after we explained how we wanted to treat the adaptation: as an answer to a letter rather than a literal adaptation that follows the action.

What were the steps in adapting, or answering?
Pierre Trividic: Essentially, it was translating the language of literature into the language of film. It was problematic because, as with all Annie Ernaux’s books, the setting for L’occupation is a psychic or mental theater and we had decided to place outside the character everything that happens inside in the book. All the intensity, the violence, the desires that the character experiences find echoes in the outside world and that is what we took as the material for our film. We soon decided not to make the character a writer, as in L’occupation, because Annie Ernaux is obviously talking about herself, her life and the people she meets. Instead, we made her a social worker. That gave us a simple, obvious reason for the character to go out and visit the world that she inhabits for professional reasons. It was also a way of incorporating Annie Ernaux’s concern with others but translated into a clear, simple professional language.

The character’s relationship to the outside world is also reflected in the way you treat the image and the soundtrack, which I believe you worked on long beforehand.
PT: Yes, that’s one of our habits, especially my partner’s, to start thinking about it while writing the screenplay. They boost each other. The screenplay can use a setting because the sound in the setting seemed characteristic, remarkable or interesting. We keep notebooks that are partly for iconography but it’s a daily activity. Film or no film, we actively cut out photos in newspapers when an image interests us. We have location notebooks that do not correspond to any particular film. Then when a film comes up, we look at the notebooks and select what is relevant to the film. There is a standard visual iconography and a sound iconography.

In a way, sound dictates image?
PMB: You could say that but in truth, things cross-fertilize constantly. The iconography notebooks are set against the sound recordings we make while a screenplay is being written. There is a triangle of screenplay, visual and sound intensities that are absolutely inseparable once we start working and we are really 100% focused on building the world we have in mind. It’s true we sometimes feel we get to the atmosphere we are looking for in image faster when we work on sound. There is immediately a very organic and sensitive connection with issues of duration, pacing and structure in sound material, much more than in an image, which is fixed. Sound can contain an element or two that interest us, either a light element or an architectural dimension. Sound is the most encompassing from the outset. It seems to us that it is very important to find the note and sound of a film before anything else. Of course we are feeling our way. It’s not a completely frozen partition. There is usually not much left of the sound material we gathered at the start over four years, but there is a trace, a particular color that we kept looking for in the landscapes that interested us.
(Lire la suite…)

12:08 Bucharest (2007) by Corneliu Porumboiu.
“I want to point the very caustic, very funny, and also very dark, 12:08 Bucharest. The TV show with the cameraman who doesn’t manage to frame the faces, the people, and the film which adopts his point of view while people are trying to find out if the revolution started before or after Caucescu’s death, is an incredible moment of political cinema.”

Synopsis : December 22. It’s been sixteen years since the Revolution and Christmas is approaching. Pisconi, an old retiree, is preparing to spend another lonely Christmas. Manescu, a history teacher, doesn’t want to lose his entire salary to pay his debts. Jederescu, the owner of the local TV station, doesn’t seem very interested in vacation. With Piscoci and Manescu’s help, he wants to find an answer to a sixteen-year-old question: “Did a revolution really take place in their city”?

More information about 12:08 Bucharest

Famous movie buff well known for his love of classical American cinema, Bertrand Tavernier stated out as a filmmaker in 1974 with The Clockmaker of St. Paul. He since built a fascinating filmography marked with commitment and a love for history from Let Joy Reign Supreme, Clean Slate, ‘Round Midnight, to Safe Conduct and Holy Lola. A fantastic new print of his “American Friends” book of interviews has just been released and his last film In the Electric Mist, shot in the United States with Tommy Lee Jones and John Goodman, will be released in France on april the 15th.