many remember the Choristers, by Frenchman Christophe Barratier, box-office champion in 2004. Young boys in rehabilitation saw themselves saved there by learning choral singing in France in 1949. We also owe the filmmaker, often a subscriber to a pre-New Wave, movies like Suburb 36 and The new button war.
With The time of secrets this time he revisits Pagnol. The film tackles the third part of its Memories of childhood, after The glory of my father and My mother’s castle brought to the screen by Yves Robert.
“Pagnol took me to the heart, confesses the filmmaker. It’s a world that reminds me of my childhood. My grandmother [Marie Perrin] was a great theater actress. She had acted in his plays mariusand the girl of the baker, introduced me to his films too. I fell in love with his universe. »
When the producer of the film offered him to adapt The time of secrets , she knocked on the right door. The book, divided into three parts, had a complex structure, in three parts: the summer vacation, high school and then the return to Provence. Barratier especially focused on the summer period. It also makes Pagnol appear as an elderly man, without betting on the voice off in order to avoid the invisible presence of the nostalgic narrator. His film, put into images by the director of photography Jérôme Alméras, between the sad or more naturalistic solar scenes, sometimes touches on magical realism. It will reach our screens on Friday.
The story takes place in 1905 when young Marcel (Léo Campion) is spending his holidays in the hills of Aubagne before entering high school. There he finds his friend Lili, who lives in the village, his uncles and aunts, falls in love with the enigmatic Isabelle (Lucie Loste Berset), a proud princess full of refinements and impostures.
“Pagnol’s universe is universal,” says the filmmaker. I was not born in Provence, but by filming the bell tower of his village there, by telling it, I realized how much the joys and sufferings of childhood were the same everywhere. These feelings have always been globalized, regardless of culture and social status. »
Marcel Pagnol was then 11 years old. “The time of secrets is that of adults, the age of the first love emotions, of the first lies. You start to disdain your best friends when you fall in love. The teenage crisis is also having believed in an enchanted world that is cracking. I find it hard to detach myself from this period, feeling nostalgic for my past, for this time when I was surrounded by people who loved me and passed on values and knowledge to me. This desire to tell stories, I owe it to those who told me. »
He believes in generational bridges between those who are beginning and those who are ending their lives. “The young Pagnol is in the transmission, like the old men. Being attentive to what the other brings us allows us to accept their mysteries. For their part, the parents are still looking for each other, because they have trouble letting go. »
In The time of secretsplay great actors, including Mélanie Doutey, François-Xavier Demaison, Guillaume de Tonquédec and Michel Vuillermoz. But at the center of the distribution sat this young non-professional, Léo Campion.
Christophe Barratier estimates that leading a child is 90% based on the choice of performer. Matter of flair. “No child is an actor,” he says. We cannot offer him a counter-employment. Deciphering a role, adult performers know how to do it, and the distribution choices are vast. Children, we discover them in the street, before taking them with what they are. Léo Campion, I met him a few weeks before shooting. The actors were generous with him. They entered its orbit. »
The poet character embodied by Vuillermoz takes the film elsewhere. “He immerses us in another universe, specifies Barratier, because he lives with his daughter Isabelle in a parallel world. She is a captive and a creator of illusions. For Marcel, the return to earth will be violent when he realizes that she played him. »
Christophe Barratier wants to find this family and this Provence, bringing to the screen The time of loveslast volume of Memories childhood by Pagnol. In this book published posthumously in 1977, Marcel discovers himself a poet. He was going to become a giant of French literature, but who could have guessed it then, if not him?
Le temps des secrets will hit theaters on 1er April.