nicole garcia | Reveal yourself in fiction

If Nicole Garcia has often come to Montreal to defend her films, this is the first time we will see her here at the theatre. The actress will be on the boards of the TNM in Royan, the French teachera solo show created at the Festival d’Avignon in 2021.

At the end of the telephone, in Paris, Nicole Garcia answers the journalist in her deep, slightly hoarse and seductive voice. She hesitates, searches for the right word, seems to be sorting through her acting memory. Sixty years of career in the theater and on the screens, dozens of roles under the direction of the biggest names in French cinema, a dozen films behind the camera as a director.

All that was missing was a solo show on this beautiful course. Royan is her first “alone-on-stage”, under the direction of her son, the director Frédéric Bélier-Garcia (she has another son, Pierre Rochefort, singer and actor, whom she had with the actor Jean Rochefort ). “It is the loneliness of my character, Gabriella, which imposes a monologue. This teacher is haunted by her ghosts. She addresses us as in a police interrogation, a police custody, before confessing. We feel her fragility, a guilt that she cannot name, because she lives her life under a breastplate. »

If Nicole Garcia goes back and forth between cinema and theater, her heart leans for the boards: “The theater is the source, she says. When I was younger, I thought I would only do theatre; the cinema arrived quite late in my career. On stage, I have the feeling of being at home, at home. It’s like going back to something close to childhood. »

Women’s school

Royan, the French teacher was written especially for Nicole Garcia. Marie NDiaye’s play highlights issues that are shaking the school environment, including harassment and bullying.

Frédéric Bélier-Garcia is familiar with the work of the novelist French of Senegalese origin, the musicality of her words. And he has already staged three of his texts in the theatre.

This French teacher, Gabriella, lives alone in Royan, a town on the Atlantic coast, near La Rochelle. She witnessed a tragedy with a student from her high school. The parents of the teenager go to her home to question her. But Gabriella refuses to see them. The teacher is afraid of giving in to madness, of digging up her ghosts from the past by talking to them…

In Royan, we find the themes dear to Marie NDiaye: guilt, absence, pretense, propriety. “It’s a moving story,” said Garcia. At the performance, the text takes on its full meaning. Marie NDiaye has a notion of tragedy in life. It is far from [théâtre] psychological. »

Royan, the French teacher. At the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, from June 13 to 17.

The #metoo of French cinema

The Press interviewed Nicole Garcia two weeks ago, just after the release of actress Adèle Haenel on the “violence of the middle of French cinema”. And in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, immersed in a controversy over the presence of Johnny Depp at the opening ceremony, star of Maïwenn’s feature film, Jeanne du Barry. Decision that led to the publication of an open letter signed by 123 actresses and actors in the newspaper Release, to express “their indignation” at “a system that supports the aggressors”.

What does the filmmaker think? In his opinion, sometimes it goes too far. “If the #metoo movement has arrived with this strength, it is because it is necessary. And its impact is salutary. It is necessary to correct the excesses, to circumscribe these men of power who have had misconduct in the middle. But we must be careful of the excesses, so as not to transform the struggle into a war of the sexes. If women start to distrust all men, to see them as enemies, things will become cynical on the sets. We have to start living and loving each other again. »