While the dark rooms are currently showering us with many superheroes living adventures so extraordinary that we need more computer-generated images than real shots to be able to transpose them to the screen, The duty gives the floor to a director who, Converselychronicles ordinary lives.
Mikhaël Hers — because it’s about him — is one of those Monets, Van Goghs and other Impressionists who don’t need the most extraordinary of subjects to give us the measure of their talent. In passengers of the night, the director and screenwriter tells us the story of Elisabeth and her family during the 1980s. This mother, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, sees her husband leave her. She who has never worked to devote her life to her family finds herself lost, adrift with her two children, Matthias and Judith. She clings to the word of anonymous people who confide on the airwaves of a nocturnal radio program. A real refuge for Elisabeth, who even finds a way to get a job there.
It is in this intimate setting that she meets Talulah, barely 18 years old and even more lost than her. This “little bird”, as she calls it, moves Élisabeth to the point that she decides to welcome it. A newcomer in the family equation who will not leave unmoved Matthias, secret teenager and poet. Thus, everyone seeks their own path and tries to (re)build themselves.
Loss, in all its forms, is a constant in the cinema of Mikhaël Hers. The director ofAmanda, This feeling of summer and Memory Lane confides tackling this theme to find a form of liberation: “I deal with subjects to find a form of serenity. A cinema that would almost be like universal art therapy. “These are subjects that touch us all at one time or another,” he says, seeing it as a way to take a step back from life.
Softness, lightness
Do not believe that our Mr. Hers is depressed and depressing. Because the other thing that emerges once again from his work is softness, lightness. The filmmaker does not give in to pathos and keeps a fundamentally benevolent look at his characters. However, Mikhaël Hers denies doing anything voluntarily: “I hear a lot about gentleness in my films. It is not a wish on my part. There is also harshness, but more underground. We make films with what we are. It is not conscious. I’m not trying to convey a message. »
The man claims to simply seek to make a cinema that resembles him. “It’s just about finding the right emotion for each film. It comes down to my personal feelings. In fact, he admits to being guided by his instinct to lead a scene to the tone that suits him.
And to do this, he found a perfect echo in the person of Charlotte Gainsbourg. “I didn’t know her before, but I had seen interviews and films of her and I had been overwhelmed by her skin-deep sensitivity. »
The actress, with an unmistakable tone of voice, had, in the words of the director, “an immediate and intuitive understanding” of the character of Elisabeth. He would also very much like to see this collaboration continue.
The daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg as well as the director are children of the 1980s. passengers of the night was therefore part of a nostalgic trip for them, whose landscape was punctuated with handpicked objects and references. “We had, with the head designer, a great attention to detail. Without making a fetish film, it was a lot of fun, ”slips the filmmaker with a smile. And Hers’s attachment to that time transpires in every shot. Right down to the texture of the image. “I am an impressionist”, says the one who wanted to “give the feeling of the 1980s”. “I wanted to make a sensory and intuitive film. That’s why I wanted to have different formats, different grain to the image, to insert archive images. The result are compositions reminiscent of an old photo album, before which we are moved by the fact that it brings back memories.