His place on the screen is like the space reserved for him in history books, a secondary role. Until now, Madame de Sévigné had only had the right to TV movies, but never to cinema honors. That was before director Isabelle Brocard captured this 17th century figure. The French letter-writer will be the heroine of a feature film due out in theaters in 2023.
The filming takes place partly in the castle of Grignan in the Drôme, where the Marquise de Sévigné went many times during her life to visit her daughter Françoise, married to François Adhémar de Monteil de Grignan.
It is the actress Karin Viard who lends her features to Madame de Sévigné, whose values resonate with the challenges of our society. “I love this woman for her feminism, her modernity. She is someone who fights for her independence and has a daughter who is quite the opposite. She is under the influence of a rather spendthrift man, runner of petticoats and she thinks she has no choice as a woman but to put up with it”comments Karin Viard.
Writing and directed by Isabelle Brocard, the film, which also includes Ana Girardot and Cédric Kahn in the cast, is based on the correspondence that Madame de Sévigné maintained for a long time with her daughter Françoise, Countess of Grignan. “I found it fascinating to tell how a woman became a writer, in spite of herself, from a very complex relationship with her daughter. Today, I think she would bombard her daughter with text messages. She would be all day on Whatsapp, that’s for sure”laughs Isabelle Brocard.
The castle, which registers 250,000 visitors a year, was closed to the public for a week, the time of filming. The production wanted to put the actors back in the original setting in order to give an extra soul to the story.
“I think it’s always very important to have an impulse, to feel a kind of preliminary atmosphere. Afterwards, it remains a museum, so we asked ourselves the question of how to bring life inside for all the scenes we were going to have. How to make it a living medium for the actors?”wonders (falsely) the production designer Laurent Ott, who has found the solution.
Some rooms have been left identical, while others have been visited with additional elements, such as… this ostrich, very much alive, which wanders through the corridors of the castle during filming. An unusual and refined atmosphere that the public will be able to discover on the big screen next year.