Posted at 6:15 a.m.
She became a filmmaker by a combination of circumstances. As she became an actress by chance. As she became a French TV star by chance. As she became a model by chance.
Charlotte Le Bon was living in the Laurentians and studying plastic arts at Cégep Lionel-Groulx, in Sainte-Thérèse, when she was spotted by the recruiter of a modeling agency. She accompanied her mother, actress Brigitte Paquette, to an ATM. “Ze rest is history”, as they say in Paris.
The young Charlotte traveled the world, from New York to Tokyo, then left modeling at the age of 23, disillusioned, to settle in Paris, where she revealed herself in all her spontaneity to the offbeat weather report of the Big Newspaperon the popular Canal+ cable channel.
10 years ago, she went from the small to the big screen, in Asterix and Obelix: at the service of Her Majesty by Laurent Tirard. Then she chained roles in the cinema – fifteen in just five years – in more or less memorable French and American productions.
Among her most notable roles is that of Victoire Doutreleau in Yves Saint Laurent by Jalil Lespert, which earned her a César nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 2015. And it was Jalil Lespert who offered her to read, and possibly adapt to the cinema, the comic strip A sisterby Bastien Vives.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY SEVILLE FILMS, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Pierre Niney and Charlotte Le Bon in Yves Saint Laurent
Lespert is one of the co-producers of Falcon Lake, the first feature film by Charlotte Le Bon, who appropriated the story and immediately decided to transpose it from the seaside in Brittany to the edge of a lake in the Laurentians, where she grew up, after spending the First 10 years of his life in Montreal. And where she bought a house about ten years ago.
The Laurentians is really the theater of my adolescence. All my summers, I spent them on the edge of the lakes, in the forests. These are landscapes that I feel like I own. Transposing the story to a place I know by heart reassured me. It is a first feature film. I needed to feel good at home.
Charlotte LeBon
Falcon Lakewhich was filmed in the summer of 2021 near the aptly named village of Gore, opens this Wednesday on the 51e Montreal New Cinema Festival. This initiatory, intimate and poetic story, which is inspired by the codes of genre cinema, received an exceptional welcome at the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival last May. It will be released, first in Quebec on October 14, then in France on December 7.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Monia Chokri and Charlotte Le Bon on the set of Falcon Lakein the summer of 2021
Charlotte Le Bon, who co-wrote the film with François Choquet, recounts the first love affairs of a 13-year-old Frenchman (Joseph Engel), Bastien, who comes to spend a few days of family vacation in a chalet by the lake where his Quebec mother (Monia Chokri) grew up with her childhood friend (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman). He instantly falls in love with the latter’s daughter, Chloe (Sara Montpetit), three years his senior, an eccentric who is interested in ghost stories and 19-year-old boys.
Charlotte Le Bon drew not only from the places of her adolescence, but also from the intense feelings that inhabited her at this time fertile in upheavals. “It’s a fucking ravine at 13 and 16, the age difference! “, she says, with this hybrid accent particular to Quebecers who have lived for a long time in France. “I’ve been in both positions. I was the chilled lover who loses all her means and who is ready to do anything to be able to seduce someone. And I was also the one who got to know herself, to know her desire through the eyes of the older boys. »
Adolescence, this often thankless pivotal moment, punctuated by petty betrayals and jealousies, when we can feel at the mercy of our feelings for others, is fertile material for creation, which has inspired many filmmakers.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY SPHERE FILMS
Joseph Engel and Sara Montpetit in Falcon Lake
“My adolescence is well digested, well analyzed, confides Charlotte Le Bon. She hurt me a lot too! In my thanks in the credits, I salute all my joys and all my traumas, from childhood to adolescence. Without that, I don’t think I would have been able to write this film. Coming of age films are often chronicles that are a bit innocent, a bit sweet, a bit cutesy sometimes. Although this is not at all the memory that I have. There’s something absolutely terrifying about falling in love for the first time. There is just that which exists. »
It is for this reason that she decided to make Falcon Lake an atmospheric story, over which hovers a deaf concern. “I found it interesting to be able to play with the codes of genre film, precisely to create a mirror between these states that terrorize us and which are of the order of the unknown, therefore almost death, and the first love emotions . »
It was this choice that, according to her, finally gave impetus to the screenplay and the backers of the film. “We couldn’t find funding and I got a lot of ‘No’s in my face! she laughs, speaking of SODEC’s successive refusals. It was, she agrees, for the best.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
Charlotte Le Bon with the main actress of Falcon LakeSara Montpetit
A multidisciplinary artist – she exhibits her drawings, also does photography – Charlotte Le Bon seems to have found a vocation in directing. She directed a short film, Hotel Judithpresented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, before devoting most of the last four years to Falcon Lake.
“I think it was Truffaut who said that life has a lot more imagination than us. It really does for me. The profession of actor fell on me, really by chance. I did this for 10 years. It became my school to become a director. And since I started directing, it seems obvious to me that I want to do this for a very long time. It’s a favorite job, which is so complete and fulfilling because it touches on everything I love. Life traced a path that gave me all the elements, all the tools I needed to do this job. I really just want to do this! »
PHOTO PROVIDED BY SEVILLE FILMS, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Charlotte Le Bon and Christian Bale in the movie The Promise
Before I even had a chance to ask her the question, she adds: “I will continue to play too! Even if she is already working on a second feature film script, we will therefore find the one we saw recently in Quebec in the brilliant series by François Létourneau and Jean-François Rivard That’s how I love you in front and behind the camera. But not both at the same time.
For me, these are two exercises that are quite incompatible. The profession of director requires being in control and the profession of actor, it requires quite the opposite. The fact of having to judge oneself, to direct oneself… For me, that would be a bit of a narcissistic exercise.
Charlotte LeBon
“Already, I hate seeing myself on screen. I would be really masochistic to want to film myself! But I admire those who are able to do it. I don’t know how they do it. »
Feverish on the eve of presenting her film to her whole family, at home in Quebec, Charlotte Le Bon is both very lucid and frank when she discusses her career. “For 10 years, I really learned through different roles that sometimes didn’t particularly inspire me, to be very honest. Lots of times I did it because I knew I had to keep learning. I’ve done a lot of shitty movies, but I have no regrets! It’s important to beat yourself up and feel a little humiliated sometimes. It will also happen to me as real, that’s for sure. If I have the chance to continue and be able to do a second one. »
We wish him luck.
Falcon Lake hits theaters October 14