INTERVIEW. With his police comedy “Mon crime”, François Ozon wanted to make “a feminist film to deconstruct the patriarchy”

Eclectic in his subjects and staging, François Ozon reconnects with his theatrical vein in my crime which comes out Wednesday, March 8. To avoid being on the street, a young actress has a Machiavellian plan: to accuse herself of a murder she did not commit. Stealing a crime is not trivial… The leading role is played by Nadia Tereszkiewicz who has just received the César for female hope for The Almond Trees. Adapted from the 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, the director tells us how he merges theater and cinema in an intriguing, stylized film with a beautiful cast.

Franceinfo Culture: The foreground of the movie is a theater curtain like in the 60s TV show Jean Renoir’s Little Theateris it intentional?

Francois Ozon: Making a film that takes place in the 1930s, we can only think of Renoir, and in the case of my crimeTo Rules of the Game, even if I am more in line with Sacha Guitry who adapted his plays to the cinema. I also like Guitry’s morality and I also had in mind the Screwball Comedy American (zany comedies) of the 30s, with their dialogues and unbridled rhythms.

What drew you to this piece from 1934?

I had the intuition that this piece could echo with today. Being in the 1930s allowed me to have a distance to make people laugh at a dramatic situation: the status of women. Making a feminist film from a false culprit to deconstruct patriarchy interested me. How women fight together, with this sisterhood, to change their status, for more freedom and equality. I am in the news but in the lightness, because there is this distance of time and historical reconstruction. What gives more freedom, of amorality also perhaps, of transgression. If I had staged my crime in our time, maybe I would have fallen into the drama, in the spirit of a film like Thanks to God who was already talking about freedom of speech. It is always a question of speaking, but of another, elsewhere.

The acting of your actors is deliberately theatrical, but you don’t do filmed theatre, how do you achieve this alchemy?

It’s a natural taste, I really like dramatization in cinema, it’s something that doesn’t scare me, it’s true that it can be seen as pejorative when you say “it’s theatrical“. But life is theatrical, people are characters, people play roles in life. I assume it, the film opens on a stage curtain, and it ends in a theater, because the theater mixes with life. For me, there is no border between the stage and the room. That’s why there is always this game of confusion between reality and fiction.

What amused me particularly was filming a trial scene like a play, where everyone plays a role, with the jurors who are the spectators who will vote, say whether to kill her or not. not. The prosecutor, the general counsel, the victim, the culprit… In the end everyone plays a role, everyone has something to say. I liked playing on this parallel between theater and justice. I’m not the first to do it, but it amused me as a director to film a trial for the first time. I love trial movies. I asked Nadia (Tereszkiewicz) to review The truth de Clouzot to keep a bit of Bardot in the trial scene where she is quite incredible. What also interested me was to feel the audience in the courtroom, an audience that crowded like at the show at the time to attend the trials of Violette Nozières or the Papin sisters. It was very easy to get to and we were like, “the victim is good“, “she plays well“, or not. We are at the theater.

There is also the beauty of the reconstruction which contributes to the theatrical dimension of the film

I wanted this pleasure, yes, it’s always enjoyable. Twenty years ago I made eight womenthen I did Vaseand there, it’s a bit like the third part: my crime complete a trilogy.

How did you find Nadia Tereszkiewicz who embodies this false culprit so well in the film?

I did a long casting to find the two young actresses who carry the film on their shoulders. A cast of 200 people. I had not yet seen The Almond Trees by Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi (for which Nadia Tereszkiewicz won the César for female hope). I hadn’t seen Rebecca Marder either in simone. So I met them, then made them work and immediately I felt a bond between them. And that was important because it was a movie about sisterhood. As there was no rivalry between the two actresses, a real friendship was created and I think it shows in the image. What there was with Nadia was precisely this lack of theatrical background, which Rebecca has on the other hand, coming from the Comédie-Française. I wanted this freshness that suited her role as a young actress just starting out. I wanted a form of abyss between what she was really going through in life and the role she had to play. In addition, both have a very 30s physique, in tune with the times.

You discover two talented actresses, but you are also faithful to your actors and your technicians from other films, what does this continuity bring you?

As I make more or less one film per year, I try to maintain the rhythm and I like to work with people with whom I get on well, to whom I am faithful, it is simpler, the work is faster . I still work with the same costume designer, Pascaline Chavanne (three César), the director of photography is Manu Dacosse with whom I had already made several films. It is therefore a pleasure to find them. And for actors, it’s the same. There I was delighted to find Isabelle Huppert, twenty years later eight women. Fabrice Luchini, we had done In the House And Vase, so this is the third time. André Dussollier, I had shot with him Everything went well. So, when you get on well with actors, it’s normal to find them and since they are great actors, you can offer them very different things. Because the language, the text of the film is quite sophisticated, quite literary, so I needed great actors for it to be in the mouth, for people to believe in it and for them to have the right phrasing. Bringing out the humor of a text is not easy. Comedy is real goldsmithery. And with actors of this level, it was a treat.

The world of cinema invites itself a lot in films at the moment (Babylon, The Fabelmans, Empire of Light), where are you my crime in this wave?

I think it’s a coincidence that is not one. I think that a lot of directors like me, during the pandemic, the period of confinement, we wondered what was going to happen for the cinema: were people going to come back to the cinema afterwards? Is there going to be a dating crisis? And we, as cinephiles who have discovered cinema on the big screen, who have shared emotions with others at the same time, we want to continue this, we want to thank those who did it. I think it’s no coincidence that Damien Chazelle makes a hymn to the cinema, if Spielberg does the same thing, Sam Mendes, and me too. It’s not free to show these two young women who go to see rue de Rennes in Paris, at the Lux, Danièle Darrieux in a film directed by Billy Wilder.

I think it’s a reflex that many filmmakers had at the same time, in relation to a complicated situation with the emergence of platforms. We are privileged in France, people go back to the cinema. But in other countries in Europe or in the United States, there is a really very important crisis. People go there less and less and go to the streaming platforms where we use it. Suddenly it no longer creates the excitement that we had to wait for a film to show on Friday evening at the film club. There, now, everything is accessible, there is a trivialization that threatens the room.

Interview on February 22, 2023, Hotel Péninsula, Paris.