Moussa is what is commonly called “good dough”. His adult daughter and son get what they want from him without fail, his sister Samia rules his daily life… Victim of a fall, Moussa wakes up different. Literally. Because here he is telling his way of thinking to those close to him, he who, the day before, agreed to everything. However, there is at least one person to applaud Moussa’s new personality: his brother Ryad, an egocentric TV host. What if a family had to tear each other apart in order to mend it even more solidly than before? As he confides in an interview, Roschdy Zem was inspired by “his people” for his film Mine.
“Such an accident happened in my family, one of my brothers suffered a head trauma. What triggered a reflection in me, then the desire to make a film; the desire to create a fiction around this event. It was cathartic, but also an opportunity to tell what family is, what my family is, ”explains Roschdy Zem, who plays Ryad, during an interview in Paris last January.
As we quickly realize in the film, the discomforts and colds occur most of the time because Moussa (Sami Bouajila), who now expresses himself with a complete absence of social filter, does not utter enormities, but well-founded comments. Thus, this post-accident Moussa, in addition to starting to manage his life differently, acts as a kind of revealing agent to the members of his family.
“It is very common, within a family, that it is necessary to wait for an illness, an accident, even a death, for certain truths to be told. Such events then act, yes, as a revealer to each member of the family, who until then will have kept such and such frustration for themselves… These personalities who suddenly reveal themselves and who had been silent for years, It inevitably triggers conflicts…”
And that, it will be understood, is very rich, dramatically speaking.
It was cathartic, but also an opportunity to talk about what family is, what my family is
Crossing the Rubicon
It is all the more so since it becomes obvious after a fairly short time that Moussa has not so much become someone else as he is, for the first time, himself. In other words, he is not a “new” Moussa, but just a Moussa who no longer represses or repress anything.
Roschdy Zem nods.
“Basically, isn’t Moussa the only one to be in the truth? I mean… Are we ever ourselves? We all advance masked. We wake up in the morning, we decide to dress a certain way, and we slip into the skin of a character to face the violence of our society. Here, we are faced with a character that we consider to be sick, except that the more the film progresses, the more it becomes apparent that it is the world that is sick. And this character, he is on the contrary in the authenticity, in the truth, since he delivers everything he feels. He is isolated and ostracized because of his sincerity, paradoxically. So the film also says something about our society with regard to our relationship with truth and lies. »
Certainly, Mine certainly says “something about our society”, but the film also says a lot about Roschdy Zem’s family: his brothers, his sister, his nephews and nieces… Without being immodest, the approach is very revealing…
“As soon as I decided to cross the Rubicon, modesty was something that I put aside. I said to myself: “If I decide to tell this, it takes a real letting go.” I committed to it and stuck to it. During the making of the film — the writing, the shooting — we are in fiction, we are in cinema. »
Speaking of writing: Roschdy Zem approached actress and director Maïwenn (the very one whose Jeanne du Barry has caused so much talk at Cannes) to co-script the film, in addition to entrusting him with the role of Emma, the companion of Ryad, the celebrity of the clan.
“It was ideal, because I was in affect with my characters inspired by those close to me, while Maïwenn did not have this closeness. It allowed him a more analytical approach, devoid of affect, more objective — when you’re talking about people you’re attached to, it’s hard to make an objective statement. And she was able to sort out what was interesting and what was sometimes a little too pathos or not funny enough…”
Roschdy Zem describes spontaneous and organic writing for a project that quickly took shape.
“It’s a film that was made in the instantaneous. There was the accident, the reflection, the writing a month later, then the shooting three months later. Many elements escaped me then, in the sense that I was not really aware of their presence, such as the reality of this Moroccan family, whose origin I never mention, but without concealing it either … Afterwards, I understood that with this film, I was also telling what my France is. »
The part of things
For memory, Mine is the sixth production by Roschdy Zem, winner of the César for best actor for Roubaix, a light, by Arnaud Desplechin. This time, he favored increased flexibility in terms of his staging.
“The situations and the themes were respected, but inside that, there was a space of freedom where I asked the actors to be creative. Each actor was a member of the family and everyone had to find their place. I often asked them to invent the first five minutes of the scene, then to invent the last five. This is one of the advantages of shooting digitally with two cameras: you can shoot scenes that have no beginning or end. So there was the text, as well as what happened before and what happened after. Then it was up to me to sort things out. »
And the family of Roschdy Zem, did she manage to “share things” by discovering her film? The filmmaker readily admits to having felt apprehension.
“That’s just my version of things. It’s a truth, not the truth. It’s inspired by real facts, as they say, but it’s reworked by my imagination. As for my family… Everyone focused on the character he or she had inspired, and it was divided into three groups: the satisfied, the disappointed… and those who didn’t recognize themselves. »