Forced to abandon his dance dreams, Adrien now lives off Martha, star fallen, but still wealthy, cinematographer residing on the Côte d’Azur. Falsely cynical, Adrien unearths the true romantic that he is in contact with Margot, a beautiful young woman living by makeshifts. And the gigolo and the scammer to build a plan that will allow them to take it easy at the expense of Martha and a certain Simon, a successful local entrepreneur, but vulnerable to the charms of Margot.
Written and directed by Nicolas Bedos, Masquerade stars Pierre Niney, Marine Vacth, François Cluzet, and above all Isabelle Adjani as a returning actress.
It is an unfinished novel which is at the origin of the film, the fourth by Nicolas Bedos after Mr and madam adelman, The good timesAnd OSS 117. Kisses from Africa.
“This project was born from a multitude of disparate desires: the desire to do something with this novel that I couldn’t finish, the desire to make a film about desire… The desire also to tell a somewhat dark period in my life,” explains the screenwriter and filmmaker during an interview in Paris last January.
“This era lent itself to a fairly dense film noir scenario,” he continues. When, like me, you write while waiting to find a good idea, there is always one that outweighs the others. There, it was this one: a mixture of autobiography and invented things. »
This tension between true and false is, in this case, at the heart of the plot. Even that it is embodied through the characters, all of them having their motives silenced and their underhanded plans: games of dupes and pretense.
holy monster
This is particularly true of the character of Martha, once a great movie star now reduced to “playing” only in her private life, public life having gone. With the huge swimming pool which flanks Martha’s villa, one does not fail to think of Norma in Sunset Blvd. (Dusk Boulevard). Isabelle Adjani embodies this monstrous and poignant woman with a generous blend of self-mockery and a sense of the tragic (and who is reminiscent at times of the manipulative starlet she composed in Have a good tripby Jean-Paul Rappeneau).
This project was born from a multitude of disparate desires: the desire to do something with this novel that I couldn’t finish, the desire to make a film about desire… The desire also to tell a dark period of my life.
“He’s a character that I don’t judge, but who is just odious enough to express the bitterness of a ending career,” notes Nicolas Bedos. In France, I’m not sure that everyone understood this character. Some thought it was a satire of Isabelle Adjani herself; they customized the thing, when no, not at all. In fact, these are things that I have observed. It’s even very inspired by women I met when I was younger: actresses who were friends of my parents and who touched me, including in their occasional monstrosity”, specifies the director, who is the son of comedian Guy Bedos and model Joëlle Bercot.
After a short break, the filmmaker confides: “There is an actress, whom I will not name, who inspired eighty percent of the character of Martha. No one remembers her anymore, but she was an important actress in France in the 1960s and 1970s. »
At the end of the first Cannes, a good part of the hexagonal criticism was unleashed, among other things with regard to the treatment reserved, supposedly, for Isabelle Adjani.
“In France, we focused on the cruelty that I would have shown towards this iconic institution that Isabelle represents, even though on the set – and she felt it since we remained friends -, I didn’t I stopped wanting to make her as beautiful, amazing, a bit crazy and inventive as she is… In short, I wanted to do Isabelle some good. »
At Figarothe star of summer murderer, Camille Claudel And The Queen Margot said she had, on the account, a lot of fun.
“I don’t think I’m a perverse person, insists Nicolas Bedos. Actors and actresses, in this case Isabelle, feel it when they read my script. I’m neither nice nor bad: I show things that interest me, that touch me, sometimes scare me. »
Black Sun
From the villa with a view of the sea that Martha occupies to the small seedy room where Adrien and Margot embrace in secret, the film oscillates between true luxury and poverty adorned with a flashy varnish. And always as a landscape, this dazzling sun and this cyan sky. The ugliness of the action and the splendor of the horizon offer a content and a form in contradiction.
“From the draft of the novel, from my first gamberges, this contrast was there. Later, I was only interested in making such a dark film when it was balanced in this way, and therefore made even more violent. That’s kind of what Aznavour used to sing: to paraphrase him, it’s worse to love each other less in Venice than in Dunkirk, with all due respect to Dunkirk. It’s worse a heartache in the sun. You can’t lock yourself in a room and listen to Barbara to the sound of the rain. The sun, the Côte d’Azur, the scooters, the terraces: it all stinks of the desire to make love. Men are more beautiful, women are more beautiful…”
Far from being numbed by the heat, the spirits are themselves more devious. Hence their propensity to weave these Machiavellian machinations over and over again.
The film Masquerade hits theaters May 19.
François Lévesque was in Paris at the invitation of the Rendez-vous d’Unifrance.