By a happy coincidence, one of the most gifted and original French filmmakers, Arnaud Desplechin, presents at Cinemania not one, but two films: Deceptionwhich stars Denis Podalydès and Léa Seydoux, and Sibling, of which Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard are the headliners. The first recounts, through encounters and romantic confidences, the affair between a man and a woman married to others, while the second lingers, against a backdrop of family mourning, at the tense reunion between said brother and said sister. , who hate each other.
To note that Deception is taken from a novel by Philip Roth, while Sibling is a bit of a sequel to the awesome and monstrous A Christmas tale. Moreover, in concert with Cinemania, the Cinémathèque québécoise presents this brilliant family chronicle, as well as kings and queenanother “relative” story.
It’s fascinating to watch Deception and Sibling in a double program, the first resembling a long amorous dialogue, and the second, a hateful dialogue, at least until its luminous resolution.
Arnaud Desplechin: I shot them in quick succession. One is a utopia about love, and the other is initially a nightmare, with Melvil who loses his son, the parents who have this accident, Marion’s tears… Deception deals with the most fragile love there is, since it is extramarital and a breath can dissipate it, and Sibling, it is this terrible anger, or this terrible fear, of the sister towards the brother, and which must cease. I was turning Deception telling myself that the characters had to love each other again, and then on Sibling, I said to myself that the characters had to stop hating each other. It was two contradictory movements.
The adaptation of Deception was an old project that you revived, right?
It was an old project, yes, and everything I wrote in connection with this adaptation was bad. And then there was the pandemic and, suddenly, the prospect of filming in a very light way, with Denis and Léa, who had imposed themselves on my mind, suddenly, that changed everything. However clumsy it may be, the work done upstream, for ten years, has served me well.
In Deception, you resort to various openly artificial processes: the passages situated in this non-place between the theater stage and the rehearsal room; preserving the characters’ American and English nationalities and assorted city names, in contrast to the distinctly French cast and locations…
I wanted it to be like a fairy tale. The characters exchange words as they exchange kisses. However, Philip Roth’s book is quite austere, and I had this obsession… Well, I’m going to be completely frank with you: a week before the start of filming, I telephoned my assistant Gabrielle Roux at one o’clock outrageously late and I said to him: “I have just counted, and we have 53 scenes where a woman discusses with a man in his office: we are dead. The public will be bored. And Gabrielle replied: “Well, Arnaud, we’re going to have to invent things.” That’s what we did: we used all the artifices of cinema to show that each moment of this love story is precious, unique, sacred, singular, magical. We wanted to enchant life.
Sibling pick up a bit where A Christmas tale had stayed. The performers change, some names too, but we recognize the characters, the conflicts too… How did the project take shape?
It came to me after Roubaix, a light. It took me a while to get back to it. I had abandoned the character of Anne Consigny, a great actress and a great friend, on this Parisian balcony, with this immense sorrow… Basically, she paid for the bitterness of the film: all the other characters got away with it, and I left the sister between two waters, with the bad role. Thinking about it, I said to myself that this question of hatred between brother and sister, I had to settle it, and that I settle it with the means of cinema. Hatred is always a waste of time. A Christmas tale, I had a blast shooting it, because it went in all directions, with all the members of this family; it was a deliberately scattered film. With SiblingI wanted to use the same themes, but this time within an obsessed film, limited to this single question of the anger between the two protagonists.
It’s far from the first time you’ve revisited characters…
Sometimes I think back to a character, and I tell myself that I haven’t finished my job. Other times, it’s because a character has a name that designates a way of being in the world that I adore, and to which I regularly want to pay homage. I am thinking in particular of Esther [en voir les variations dans Comment je me suis disputé… ma vie sexuelle, Esther Khan, et Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse]. Esther, this young girl who cannot speak, unlike the characters around her, but who has an infinite knowledge of the world. To pay homage to all these “Esthers” that I have met, for me, it’s not a duty, it’s a joy.
One of the characteristics of your cinema lies in your dialogues, which are always very neat.
I find that cinema, everywhere, is more and more seized by a realistic ideology; the characters speak to each other in everyday words. This approach is marvelous for a lot of filmmakers, like Chloé Zhao, whom I loved nomadland. However, at the age of 28, I had an experience that transformed me, seeing on TV The two English women and the continent, by Francois Truffaut. There was this scene where Stacey Tendeter asked Jean-Pierre Léaud why he had just touched her cheek, and he replied: “Because you are from Earth, and I think I like that. And I said to myself, that’s what my job will be: to invent exceptional scenes, exceptional sentences, moments when you catch yourself saying something that is bigger than you. I do not belong to the realistic school; it’s not my culture. I belong more to a literary school.
Romantic relationships and family relationships, sometimes separately, sometimes together, are at the heart of your cinema, as these two recent films remind us. But a film with a detective and social content like Roubaix, a light, proves that you are not a prisoner of these themes. Why do you like to come back so much?
The family is the smallest society possible. I am thinking of Chekhov, who could paint the whole society through a family. For me, the family is a minimalist social theater. As for the question of romantic relationships, I believe that cinema can say something about love that novels cannot. On the nature of romantic relationships between men and women, between men and men or women and women… There is a miracle in cinema that fascinates me.
The Cinemania Festival presents Deception November 9 and Sibling November 10 and 11 at the Imperial. Both films will hit theaters on November 11 and arrive on Crave on November 13. The Cinémathèque presents A Christmas tale November 10, and kings and queen the 11th of November.