"You feel the happiness"...Part Three of Tom Ryan's conversation with Cedric Klapisch - On CHINESE PUZZLE (France, 2014)

Editor's Note: In 2005, Tom Ryan travelled to Paris for The Age,  where, with Stephanie Bunbury they interviewed the amiable and very likeable Klapisch about the first two films in the trilogy. That interview (click here for the link)  was followed by a discussion with Romain Duris about his work with Klapisch. 

 

In March 2014, corresponding with the Australian release of Chinese Puzzle, Tom spoke to writer-director Cedric Klapisch again, this time by phone. That interview appears below. 

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Romain Duris, Cedric Klapisch while filming Chinese Puzzle

The publisher in Chinese Puzzle says about Xavier’s books that he would say that “they’re about me but they’re about you too”… Would you say the same is true for you about the three films in your trilogy?

 

Of course. The idea was to take a particular character for a fictional story and to make that character somehow related to the audience. That’s what’s interesting about fiction: that you can depict someone who’s very particular, perhaps even peculiar, and see how he or she relates to everyone. So with Xavier, the idea for the first film, L’Auberge Espagnole, was to take someone who was very normal, very common, and then follow the changes he goes through, looking at the ways in which we could make the audience identify with him.

 

How much is Xavier you? How much is he Romain Duris? And would it be accurate to say that he’s become you less and less and more a character in his own right as the series has gone on?

 

I really agree with you, Tom, because I think he was a lot more me in L’Auberge Espagnole, a little less in Russian Dolls and there’s about 30% left of me in the last one. I think that change gives the character authenticity and sincerity. My connection with the last film is that I separated from someone when I was 40 years old and now I live every other week with my two children. So this is how the film relates to what has happened to me in the last 12 years, since my separation. 

 

Cecile de France, Romain Duris, Kelly Reilly, Audrey Tautou
Chinese Puzzle

That way it’s really related to me. Other than that, I’m not with someone from England, I don’t live in New York, and everything that happens to Xavier is really something else. Romain gave his body and his way of talking to the character. You could say that’s about 10% of himself. Which leaves 60% left for fiction.

 

How much of what Xavier tells us as narrator should we believe? Is he reliable?

 

I think so. I think with the voice-over, it’s what he really thinks and that he’s really sincere about himself. I think it’s so obvious when he’s lying that you trust him when he’s not.

 

But when he says, for example, that life is so complicated and his daughter makes it all simple (“two mummies and one daddy”), aren’t we supposed to see it all as a question of his viewpoint?

 

I think he’s telling the truth, which is why I think he’s reliable. I think he’s very sincere as he tries to explain to his children how they’ve acquired another sibling. When you’re talking to someone who’s four years old, you can say everything.

 

I understand from your comments in the press kit that putting the film together as a project was much more difficult than for the first two. Have Canal Plus become harder to deal with?

 

I wouldn’t say so because the problems I had didn’t come from StudioCanal. They came from the fact that everything was more expensive: the actors, shooting in New York with all the American rules. So that made it all more complicated. 

 

OK, money always complicates things. But you were able to work on the film the way you wanted?

 

Yes. I was really free to work the way I wanted, because StudioCanal is very respectful about authors and about the freedom with the script and so they really left me alone. They might come to me with disagreements about something, but they’re happy to talk it through. And it’s really a collaboration.

 

Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris, Chinese Puzzle

You told me 10 years ago that whereas you made L’Auberge Espagnole on the run, drawing on improvisations during rehearsal, Russian Dolls was “the same kind of movie with more reflection”. Was making Chinese Puzzle more in line with that second approach? 

 

Yes. Even more than with Russian Dolls because, you know, it speaks for itself. L’Auberge Espagnole was written in two weeks, Russian Dolls in three or four months, and this one in eight months. And so that gives you how much time we had to plan each of the films. In this one, I had to forget about the improvisation and the freshness and innocence I knew I had with the first one…

 

I understand that you were shooting at least some of the film in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. And that must have meant a lot of filming on the run.

 

That’s what’s strange, Tom. It’s exactly the opposite of how it was generally in New York because with the American technicians and the American rules, you have to plan things out a lot. But when the hurricane happened, we had to invent a new way of shooting and we found ourselves doing the same thing we were doing 12 years ago on L’Auberge Espagnole. I felt comfortable just after the hurricane because it was more the French way, more my way of working, to do things at the last moment and to react to the fact that a street was destroyed and we had to move but didn’t have authorisation. And during the last day of shooting we went back to what we had with L’Auberge Espagnole in the first place.

 

Xavier says at the end that “when you arrive at happiness, it’s time to stop”. However, happiness is transient and true happiness is always somewhere in the future. Could I deduce from this that we might be catching up with Xavier, his friends and his children a bit further down the track?

 

I think that at the end of L’Auberge Espagnole he says that it’s time to start now, and so the end of the movie was the beginning of something.

 

On the tarmac…

 

That’s right. And I think that’s what’s so strong about the first movie and why people would ask about a second movie and then a third. It was always because the ending would seem like a new beginning. I think that when you leave the audience with something which is just starting, it’s then that you feel the happiness. It’s something you haven’t seen and you feel like something is going to result. 

Xavier's arranged marriage, Chinese Puzzle

 

So I think that what he says about happy endings and about the fact that, even though we all want to be happy in our lives – and it’s often very complicated to be happy in real life – in a fiction, when you describe happiness, what his publisher says is true, that, if you make a novel or a film with only happiness, it’s very boring. You can’t do anything with it. There’s nothing to say about it. 

 

So it’s strange when we follow someone’s life and what he’s writing about his life. For fiction, it’s better that you have problems and conflict and, for your real life, it’s better if you don’t have that.

 

I’m not sure that you’ve answered my question about whether or not we’re likely to see them again.

 

Oh, I don’t know if there’ll be a fourth. In 10 years from now, I have no idea if I will have the desire to make another film with the same actors. So it will depend on that. If there is the desire, then I will make one. If I don’t have any ideas in the next 10 years, then I won’t.

 

When I spoke to you about Russian Dolls, there were a couple of scenes you mentioned – one you had to cut about Wendy saying that she actually likes her work, and another about how silly lovers look to little children – that turn up here. I get the sense that you’ve been working on Chinese Puzzle, on and off, ever since you’ve finished Russian Dolls. So are you now gathering ideas like that for the next sequel?

 

[Laughing] The thing that I think about for a fourth film is that I know that the ending would need to be about Xavier’s son leaving for a different country. It would be a good ending to end with the same kind of scene as in the first film. For me, that would be a good starting point for a fourth film.

 

One final question. Many of the scenes in Chinese Puzzle create echoes of incidents and situations in the earlier films: the airport separation; looking for an apartment; sleeping on somebody’s couch; late-night cavorting in the street; fairytale references; the rush to help a friend from being caught out with someone else by their partner; and so on. When you were writing it, was that your plan, or did it just happen?

 

Obviously I thought about it and I tried to work on the echoes and the correspondences that the three movies can have. But I was also aware that I didn’t want to copy the first two ones. I wanted to be creative and to invent new events and a new way of filming and that’s why it took so long. It was really tricky working out how to manipulate the elements to come up with something that had to look like the first two films and also be different. So it was really a question of balance.

"A kind of complicity" - Part Two of Tom Ryan's 2005 conversation with Cedric Klapisch and Romain Duris rediscovered - The interview with Romain Duris

 

In the earlier part of this 2005 interview with director Cedric Klapisch and actor Romain Duris, Tom Ryan discussed the creation of the character Xavier who is the central character of the films L’Auberge Espagnole/The Spanish Apartment  and Russian Dolls. In this section of their conversation Tom talks to actor Duris about the role and working with Klapisch. Duris also appears in Greek Salad a  new series created by Klapisch which is streaming on Amazon Prime and was reviewed here by Peter Hourigan

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 A very laidback Romain Duris (2005), a man with a very mischievous sense of humour.
Photograph by Tom Ryan.

Do you think that you and Xavier have anything in common?

 

During the shooting of the film, given that Xavier is a character who doubts constantly, I did get the feeling that that doubting could infect me as well as a person. But I got over that.

 

When did you find out that a sequel was in the works?

 

Very early on with L’Auberge Espagnole, we realised that it could lead to a sequel. And I expect that we’ll now do a third movie, after Xavier and Wendy have had children. But I don’t want to be Xavier every time I work with Cedric. I want to keep working with him, but I want to play other roles too. We work together really well. I look at Cedric and understand automatically what he wants next. I haven’t had that kind of complicity with anyone else.

 

How has he changed since you first worked with him in 1994?

 

He’s evolved a lot. He’s more mature in his work and, with the experience he’s gained over the past ten years, he’s become very professional in his approach while at the same time he’s always had the most wonderful carefree insouciance. He hasn’t lost the light-hearted approach that he had when he was younger. The freedom that he encourages means that you can take risks, that you’ll embrace the danger. But his vision of people, of human beings, hasn’t changed. He's somebody who likes people and it shows in his films…

 

Romain Duris and Cedric Klapisch during the shooting 
of Russian Dolls

How do his working methods compare, say, to Jacques Audiard or Benoit Jacquot?

 

Cedric’s style is always very close to comedy. He likes to be subtle about it, not to be overt and overstep the mark. Like Audiard, he likes to have inputs from others that will help the story and the characters to evolve. That’s what makes working with him such a joy. It’s real creativity.

 

Others, like Audiard and Tony Gatliff seem to be making films on the run. Does it feel like that to you when you’re working with Cedric? 

 

Audiard is the fastest. He likes things when they’re not prepared. Gatliff used to be like that, but as he’s gone on he’s become more in favour of organising things. Cedric is much more organised. He needs more time so as he can attain this undercurrent of comedy. It doesn’t happen immediately. You have to work on it. 

One of Cedric’s strengths is his desire to pursue the philosophical underpinnings of a scene, to make it light on the surface but serious underneath, which brings him very close to one of the people he admires, Fellini. Only the packaging is lightweight. The same as with a lot of the American films with Cary Grant, like the Howard Hawks ones. 

 

They’re comedies, but what they’re about, what they’re saying, is very powerful. They’re about the search for self. Xavier is constantly looking for something. And making mistakes all along the way. So you might take the films as philosophical tales of our times. Xavier is fortunate enough to be able to take time to ask questions of others and, most importantly, of himself. It’s a luxury. There are many for whom that would be an impossibility.

“You have to learn to live with imperfection.” - Part One of Tom Ryan's interviews with Cedric Klapisch and Romain Duris rediscovered

 

Photographs by Tom Ryan. Cedric Klapisch before I invited him to smile for
the camera in a room at the Hotel Meurice, and then afterwards.

 

In his recent piece for Film Alert drawing readers’ attention to the arrival on Amazon Prime of French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch’s delicious 2023 series, Salade Grecque (Greek Salad), made in collaboration with wife Lola Doillon, Peter Hourigan rightly observed that the 62-year-old writer-director is worthy of closer attention than he’s so far received. “Klapisch is a director with a solid career, many successful films, with prizes and nominations from many major film festivals,” Peter wrote. “Yet, he doesn’t seem to have quite become a ‘name director’, the kind who attracts scholarly monographs from academic writers.”

 

Klapisch is a writer-director whose work I’ve long admired too, from the first film of his that I saw, 1996’s irresistible Chacun cherche son chat (When the Cat’s Away), co-written with Buenos Aires-born Santiago Amigorena (with whom he’s worked on seven projects) and starring Garance Clavel. After it, there were many others, including Un air de famille (1996), which he co-wrote with lead actors, Agnes Jaoui and her then partner Jean-Pierre Bacri (they separated in 2012 and he died in 2021), and the very wacky Peut- être (1999). 

 

Then there was the thoroughly engaging Paris (2007), with Fabrice Luchini and Romain Duris, and 2011’s biting social comedy, Ma parte du gâteau (My Piece of the Pie) with Karin Viard. In 2017, he gave us the splendid family drama, Ce qui nous lie (Back to Burgundy), and, two years later, the amiably wry romantic comedy, Deux moi (Someone, Somewhere), with Ana Girardot. 

 

Perhaps best of all, though, is his wonderful ensemble trilogy, which began in 2002 with L’auberge espagnol (The Spanish Apartment, aka Pot Luck), which starred Duris alongside Kelly Reilly (now probably best known as Beth Dutton in TV’s Yellowstone), Cécile de France and Audrey Tautou and which takes place in Barcelona. After it came Les poupées russes (Russian Dolls) in 2005, whose settings include St. Petersburg, Paris, London and Moscow, followed in 2013 by the Manhattan-based Casse-tête chinois (Chinese Puzzle). And now Greek Salad, which is set in Athens, revolves around the Duris and Reilly characters’ brother-and-sister offspring (played by Aliocha Schneider and Megan Northam) and dealing with the ways in which the new generation’s immersion of themselves in life’s complications is similar to and, in some ways, different from their parents’.

 

Although Klapisch satirises the world of television in Russian Dolls as a relative outsider – in 1994, he’d made a couple of short films as part of an AIDS-prevention program that ended up on French TV as 3000 scénarios contre un virus – in 2015, he became a full-fledged insider. He directed the first and third episodes of the opening season of the hugely enjoyable series, Dix pour cent (Call My Agent!), as well as, in 2018, a live HD broadcast of the ballet Quatre chorégraphes d'aujourd'hui à l'Opéra de Paris: Thierrée/Shechter/ Pérez/Pite.

 

In 2005, I travelled to Paris for The Age, on a junket organised by UniFrance to promote French cinema where, with my estimable Age colleague Stephanie Bunbury – who remains the masthead’s finest feature writer about film and the other arts – I interviewed the amiable and very likeable Klapisch about the first two films in the trilogy. That interview, along with my discussion with Duris about his work with Klapisch, begins below and will continue in subsequent editions of Film Alert.

 

In March 2014, corresponding with the Australian release of Chinese Puzzle, I spoke to the writer-director again, this time by phone. That interview will appear in Film Alert soon after the first.

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Part One: “You have to learn to live with imperfection.”

 

Tom: Both L’Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls seem like very personal films. Are they?

 

Cedric Klapisch: L’Auberge Espagnole was a very strange experience because it was done very quickly. I had five months to write the story and shoot the movie, which was almost impossible. It was a crazy set-up. Everything we did, I didn’t have time: I didn’t have time to rewrite, I didn’t have time to think. And it was just pure energy which went really well with the subject. It was a matter of trying something and, if wasn’t really the right thing, it didn’t matter because it’s really about the energy. 

The ensemble in L'Auberge Espagnole/The Spanish Apartment

I’d been thinking about the movie for a long time, maybe 10 years, so I had the story somewhere in my head. And so, when I wrote the screenplay, it only took me two weeks. I think I had many things ready to say, so it wasn’t really two weeks. So that was L’Auberge Espagnole and, at the end, when I saw the movie, I felt I needed to make a second one, to redo it, this time with thinking. With some distance and with reflection. 

I think Russian Dolls is the same kind of movie with more reflection. I wanted to add some kind of depth to the process because L’Auberge espagnole works on the lightness. Which was also good for the subject, because it was about someone who’s turning 30 and knows he’s making important choices about his life. Russian Dolls is a much more thought-out movie.

 

It’s a deeply romantic film, not just because the couple get together at the end but because of the way they reflect on love. Everybody talks about it, but they’re all talking about something different. I found it really moving. And when Wendy says, “I’m in love with all your imperfections,” I just cried.

 

I agree with you. I think it’s something that I came to understand as I grew up, that, in the first part of my life, I was looking for perfection, or dreaming about it, and I had to realize that perfection doesn’t exist and I had to get along without it. Not just with love, but with everything. There are always mistakes and stupidities, and you have to learn to live with them. You have to learn to live with imperfection.

 

Is Xavier you?

 

I don’t think so. I think he was more me in L’Auberge espagnole. I felt close to him because I went to study filmmaking in New York and spent two years there. And even though it’s not the same story that happens in Barcelona, I made an effort to put some distance between me and Xavier when I was writing L’Auberge espagnole. And with Russian Dolls, while I was trying to follow the same character, I was trying to be mindful of his logic. He’s 30 in 2005, which is not the same thing as being 30 when I was, 14 years ago, so I think that he’s not who I am any more. 

Romain Duris, L'Auberge Espagnole

 

He’s a writer but I don’t think his doubts about life and love are like mine. Perhaps in some period of my life they were, but I didn’t go through the same things. And I think that the Xavier of Russian Dolls is more truthful for someone who is 30 years old now, when teenagers seem much older than they used to. 

 

When I grew up, it was very different. There was no Play Station, or internet, or social media. The leisure civilization that we’re dealing with puts people into problems where they want to stay children for longer. They’re infantilised and gentrified. I can still relate to Xavier, but he’s really a fictional character.

 

Stephanie: Has Xavier taken on any of Roman?

 

When he and I are interviewed together, journalists also ask him if he’s Xavier. But it’s really not me and not him but somewhere in-between, because it’s his body... But he’s not like that in real life.

 

Tom: Is Xavier going to become your Antoine Doinel?

 

Yes, it’s already happened. What I said to the actors was that we’d call each other in five or ten years and see where we were and what’s up. With Russian Dolls, when I called the actors, they were really keen to work together again, not only with me but together again. So if I feel the same need in five years, I’ll try to find a story. But I’ll have to see with the passage of time whether it’s worth it or not. Maybe we’ll hate each other in five years…

 

Stephanie: That could still be interesting…

 

[Laughing] Yes.

 

Tom: It strikes me that all your films keep coming back to the same theme, the same idea: how groups of people come together and work out their lives. It’s as if the idea of people finding themselves through communities is something that’s really important to you… Are you consciously looking for this?

 

Well, it wasn’t conscious before, but now I have to admit that it’s more and more conscious. It wasn’t intentional, but everything that I’ve come up with, every story that’s interested me, deals with what binds people: how boundaries exist in a family, or a group of friends, or a couple, or a company. If I deal with only personal problems, for me that wouldn’t be enough. And I think that I can go even further in that direction. 

 

The ensemble re-assembles Russian Dolls

I try to see what can be the connection between psychology and politics. Is there a relationship between personal, intimate problems and globalisation? When you tell stories, you’re dealing with conflicts, you’re dealing with problems and it’s just a matter of what kind of problems you’re dealing with. Whether that character is the President or an ordinary person, it’s just a question of scale for a movie. 

 

I think that the world is like that. Globalisation has made us more aware of the rest of the world. I think that we can be emotional about the World Trade Centre in 2001 and about the tsunami, whereas years ago I think it wasn’t like that. A Frenchman now knows about how someone in Pakistan lives, or Africa, so I think that you can deal with international problems in an intimate way… 

 

It’s very interesting to be an observer of that. And I think that racism gives you the temperature of how people are relating to each other and to their own lives. How you deal with differences is critical. Modern life drives people to experience diversity much more than before.

 

There are problems everywhere: people marching in the streets in Paris, race riots. And we’re still seeing people blindly adhering to the American myth that when you’re poor, you can still make it. That’s what 50 Cent’s film, Get Rich or Die Trying [2005, directed by Jim Sheridan, written by Terrence Winter] is about. Whereas in France, people don’t believe that when you’re poor you can change your social circumstances. There is a powerful connection between psychology and politics: if you can make people believe something, then it becomes true for them.

 

Bush and Sarkozy are both authority figures, making empty gestures towards doing the right thing: like affirmative action, which creates quotas for the conduct of public life.

 

Is the satire in Russian Dolls about what happens behind the scenes of TV shows based on your own experience, or are you imagining it?

 

No, it’s not my experience because I’ve never really worked for TV. But I know it’s like that because I have friends in the business. What was of interest to me was that I had two characters, Xavier and Wendy, who were going live inside a love story. I thought it would be interesting to look at the way we’re surrounded by such stories: we read books, we see films and we always talk about our love lives. But when you experience it and have to actualise it in your life, it’s different. And that difference is what those scenes were really about. You said the movie was romantic, but it’s hard to be romantic because we’re overfed with romanticism.

 

Like Passionate Love in Venice! [in Russian Dolls, this is the title of the TV show Romain Duris’ Xavier is writing for BBC2]

 

[Laughter] That’s right. But it’s true that when you go with your lover to Venice, it’s great. But it’s about how to deal with the cliché when you’re on the beach and the sun is setting and it’s all so nice. I have two children and I see the way children make fun of lovers when they’re holding hands and kissing and hugging. They look stupid and, when you fall in love, you have to go through the fact that it is stupid. I think that’s what’s funny about love: how it’s difficult to accept being ridiculous when you fall in love.

 

Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris, Russian Dolls

I was just thinking you might have had some trouble with backers, or financiers or producers who would come to you and say, “You can’t do that.” And “It has to be a happy ending”.

 

No. That’s what’s great about the French way of producing. When we made When the Cat’s Away, we had intended to make a short film about that and we made a feature. I was inventing it as we were shooting and the producers – Canal Plus especially – were prepared to be blind on the script because they knew I was able to work like that. And for them it was more trusting my way of working than trusting a script or a story. It’s a great privilege. They know that if I feel free, then I’ll do better. It might be different for other directors, but I have to feel free in order to be creative.

 

Like Xavier.

 

[Laughter]

 

Stephanie: In those films, there’s a very dim view of corporate life. Xavier does not want to work in that company, and he doesn’t want to work at that television station. I’m with him, I must say. And you did seem to be making a sly comment or two about the nature of corporate life.

 

There was a scene that I cut where Isabelle [the Cécile de France character] says she was enjoying working for that company in London, and it was important for me to have somebody say that. She doesn’t need to be free with her job in the same way that Xavier does

 

So why did it get scrapped?

 

The film was already too long and the scene wasn’t well-written enough.

 

It sounds like you’re quite hard on yourself when you’re editing.

 

I need to be. I’m very loose in the way I make films. But I have to be hard on myself at some point because I think that writing and storytelling is about erasing and getting rid of things that aren’t working.

 

You must lose a lot that you like.

 

Yes. But it’s always for good reasons. I know at the end of the editing that I’ve made choices to make the story work better. You can’t put everything you shoot in and so it’s always going to be a question of choosing.

 

Well, it has to be said that the films all move along very briskly. Romain has mentioned Howard Hawks…

 

How it what?

 

Howard Hawks. 

Tom: As in Bringing up Baby.

 

[Laughter] OK, I heard “how it works”

 

Stephanie: Yes, I was going to use his films as a point of comparison. And we all agreed that there was this feeling of effervescence. Comedy that moves very quickly.

Tom: But that’s also serious underneath.

 

That’s what I like about Howard Hawks: how you can be serious and light at the same time.

 

Stephanie: It’s interesting how your humour really travels, and often that’s not the case. I wonder if you’re particularly conscious of that?

 

I’m discovering that. And it’s interesting for me. But do you know why?

 

I have no idea. But in your films, the humour is very immediate. And the humour about national characteristics is also very immediate. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly French point of view.

 

I also travel a lot. Maybe it’s something you get when you live in another country for a long time? Then you come to know what’s working in different places. There’s more of a chance to be human rather than just national. Maybe because of that I’m dealing with human nature rather than specifically cultural humour or cultural things.

 

There’s that wonderful scene where the German character is trying to study for his exam and the English boy comes into his room and says, “Oh, this room is so tidy. You’ve got to be German.” That’s so hilarious. And I can’t believe that someone from another country wrote that because it says so much about the relationship between the English and the Germans.

 

We were rehearsing in Paris and I had all the actors together and I said to the German guy that we should have something about Nazism. All the actors agreed, but he said, “No, why? I don’t want to do that.” It was funny because he then realised that he had to go through that. 

 

And Kevin Bishop [who plays the Kelly Reilly character’s brother] said, “I’d like to try an improvisation and he had the idea of making it funny and I rewrote the script in line with his ideas. I was glad that he came up with that because it was much better that someone English came up with that and not Xavier and the other guys.

 

No, Xavier would never say something like that.

 

But he would think the same thing. [Laughter]

 

Tom: Is there a lot of improvisation in these films?

 

Ummm. In L’Auberge Espagnole, yes, because I didn’t have much time and I thought it was a good thing. With people like Kevin, it was great to work that way because he’s great at that. But I needed to rewrite and so I used it in rehearsal as something to give me ideas. But on the set we weren’t improvising.

Next: A Conversation with Romain Duris

Filmic Postcard: Janice Tong Reports from the 32nd Alliance Française French Film Festival 2021 (Part 4) - EIFFEL (Martin Bourbolon) and NIGHT SHIFT (Anne Fontaine)

Gustave Eiffel

Is the mark of an actor-on-the rise realised when they make slight but noticeable cosmetic changes to their appearances? Does that outer ‘shell’ and the way they look pave the way for a more masterly artist? I do not claim to have answers to these questions, but I’ve been thinking about these concerns over the years as I encounter, with interest, the range of diverse faces across European and UK cinemas vs the more homogeneous faces of Hollywood. 

 

Romain Duris as Gustave Eiffel (centre) Eiffel

Romain Duris has an incredibly handsome face; and in aging, he really grew into his looks; however, I did notice that, at some point, he had his teeth whitened and straightened, and as such, conforming to Hollywood’s ideal star status. His thick hair is somewhat tamed in his latest film, Eiffel (2020) directed by Martin Bourboulon, where he plays the eponymous turn of the 19th Century civil engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, who achieved world-wide fame from his enormous feat, a structure that stands at exactly 300 metres tall, made solely of metal that, to this day, 132 years after it was built still attracts tourists from all over the world today. It is of course, the Eiffel Tower in Paris. 

 

Eiffel   the film, however asks of us to disregard anything we already know about the man, (and I must admit, I knew very little) to instead be swept away by the grandeur of Paris at the turn of the 19th Century; and to discover that at the heart of the story, a secret love affair from his youth. It is now years later, and he as the successful and determined working-class engineer, a father of five children to his late wife, is to suddenly be reminded of his irreconcilable love affair with the bourgeois Mayor of Bourdeau’s, only daughter - Adrienne Bourgès, played by Emma Mackey (you may know her as Maeve from the TV series Sex Education). This affair serves as the impetus for the story that is told in flashbacks. Now in 1887, it is years later, he has the unfortunate pleasure to rekindle this acquaintance, but she is now his friend’s wife. 

Emma Mackey, Romain Duris, Eiffel

 

Is this fill-fated romance one that has been reimagined? Perhaps so, but the film is set at the cusp of the 1887 World Fair competition, and Eiffel, with the memory of his dissolute affair opening up fresh wounds, is spurred on to make a mark for himself by winning the World Fair; and to show to his colleagues once and for all his true mantel.

 

I asked the question of appearance at the start of this article because that is the question that comes to mind when watching Duris in this particular film. Whilst I’m not one for historic accuracies in a romanticised filmic view or filmic-universe of a notable figure in history; it is however interesting that Martin Bourboulon casted him in the title role, considering he bore little to no resemblance to Eiffel himself. Other films such as Bonello’s Saint Laurent (2014) or Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent (2014) both had lead actors with a passing resemblance to Laurent. The whole film seemed to be about a ‘show of success’ or the appearance of triumph over adversity - as it culminated in the closing segments of the film. 

 

What we have here, as a result, is that we are treated with a film that is a Hollywoodised fairytale. Although it is still good to see Paris in the turn of the century, and better still, to learn from this film the untold brilliance of Eiffel - he must have been a genius to invent the compressed-air caissons system that stablised the base of the Eiffel Tower; and the way this is calibrated to allow the machined parts (all manufactured in his studio) to meet up. This is despite the many outrages felt at the time, especially the intelligentsia’s response to the ‘monstrosity’ of this structure.  Guy de Maupassant famously said he had to leave Paris because of it. I found that there is immeasurable beauty in the lace-work, at the bottom tier, the lattice frame is delicate, or as delicate as metal structure can be; and shows refinement in its design. But of course, what triumphed for Gustave Eiffel was actually his audacity to make a permanent home for this structure at the heart of Paris. 

 

I preferred Duris in more subtle roles, such as in Christophe Honoré’s Dans Paris (2006), or as the love-lorn and anti-hero / concert-pianist-wanna-be in The Beat That My Heart Skipped(2005) or even as the person who is running away from his own identity in The Big Picture (2010) which I reviewedl ast year. 

 

I guess I like these kinds of characters because they seem to be closer to posing those moral questions that are at the heart of humanity.

 

And this kind of moral dilemma is the topic of Anne Fontaine’s latest offering Night Shift / Police (2020).

Night Shift  asks us to question our moral code
Virginie Efira, Payman Maadi

 

I’m still wondering about the words ECILOP - that was shown at the start of the film…why this mirror image? It bothers me not knowing what this signifies.

 

I don’t want to give anything away in terms of storyline, but this is a film that is a lot slower paced than you would expect from a police-style narrative. And there’s a reason for this… and why it is called Night Shift. Is it a night that will change the lives of the three policemen who were involved in the narrative? No, I don’t think so.  Their lives carry on as per usual in the cold light of day, and that perhaps is the crux of what the film is trying to get at. 

 

What changes when justice is served, but not the kind of justice that you believe is morally right. 

Omar Sy, Virginie Efira and Grégory Gadebois

 

Whilst I have admired Fontaine’s previous works, I found Reinventing Marvin (2017), a film that I had the good fortune to see at the French Film Festival a couple of years back, where she was both writer and director, to be a mature and really well-told story. As was The Innocents (2016). 

Virginie Efira, Night Shift

 

But I found Night Shift to be a little too slow for my liking, it was partly let down by the cast, Omar Sy was just Omar Sy, and Virginie Efira was not great in her role here. Coupled with that, certain elements, like the slow-motion shots of the horse that is meant to be a poignant moment, meaning our relationship with animals trumps our relationship with other human beings; that there is always a barrier or code which we go by. Well it’s just a bit formulaic. I get that these revelations are just that… banal, and there’s the sting - we no longer flinch from the violence that has become inherent in our societies. But I think it can be told differently.

 

I once read somewhere that they played Handel’s Dixit Dominus over the radio to mark the end of WWII, so it is with the grace of Bach’s Sonata No. 5 in F minor BWV 1015 - the Adagio movement  played by Glenn Gould and Jaime Laredo, that Anne Fontaine closes the sequence of events of the night. The inescapable moral horror of the night is transcended through the contemplative beauty of this piece of music. I thank her for introducing me to this recording - this is a piece of music that I have been playing every day since I left the theatre. You can find the exact piece here, or it can be downloaded as a single track from iTunes from the Glenn Gould Remastered: The Complete Columbia Album Collection, which is my preferred recording of the piece.

Note that Alliance Française has extended their Sydney French Film Festival season until the 5th April