Hello holidays, The day after the night before, Eurotriptravel comedies almost all follow the same recipe: characters on vacation have a series of misadventures, to the point of regretting having left. But in Travel in Italya burlesque and intimate autofiction by Sophie Letourneur, almost nothing happens. And that is precisely the subject of the film.
Intimacy is also approached in every sense of the term. First, there is intimacy as a subject—that of the bobo couple played by Philippe Katerine and Letourneur herself, whose story is inspired by a trip the filmmaker actually took in 2016. Then there is the intimacy of the production context, which is revealed through clever mise en abyme, the film’s small crew having captured moments on the fly among the tourists who visited the filming locations in Sicily.
“There is an excitement, something nervous in our acting, when we shoot like that,” says the eccentric Philippe Katerine, met with the director on the sidelines of the Canadian premiere of the film at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in October 2023. The result is truer, [d’autant que] I recognize myself in my character. At the same time, we show what is in the folds, what we don’t usually see. We represent “the infraordinary”, as Perec would say.
Sophie Letourneur wanted to express her “fed up feeling with the painful realities of relationships, including the inevitable impoverishment of passion.” Her characters visit heavenly places, but do nothing but grumble. They discuss banalities about their daily activities, without ever addressing the fundamental issues that undermine their relationship. “It is precisely because nothing special happened on my 2016 trip that I wanted to make a film about it,” says the director.
“A crazy adventure”
“I recognized in Sophie’s script a certain vertigo that all couples face at one time or another,” says Philippe Katherine. “A couple’s trip is a crazy adventure. We get together to eat, we wonder what we’re going to do, what we’re going to say to each other, if we’re going to get along. It’s a huge thing to build together.”
The singer and the filmmaker are disconcertingly natural in their interpretation of a jaded Parisian couple, so much so that one might believe that several scenes are improvised. This is not the case. The accuracy of the dialogues is mainly attributable to Letourneur’s unusual writing process, which involved recording real conversations between her and her husband and then using them as inspiration for the writing.
“I originally intended to use these bits of sentences, these snippets of ordinariness, as notes to guide my writing,” she says. “When I listened to them again, I was very touched. I understood that they had to be part of the film.” The director not only depicts this process in a mise en abyme where we see her recording herself as she recalls her travel memories with her husband, but she also played the “notes” in the actors’ ears during filming.
“I was playing the parrot,” Philippe Katherine sums up. “I heard the voice of Sophie’s real husband in an earpiece when I delivered the line. It’s paradoxical, I felt even more like myself that way. I felt natural, I found my own rhythm again.”
Tribute to Rossellini
Sophie Letourneur was also inspired by Roberto Rossellini, to whom she pays homage in the film. The title is intended as a nod to his Journey to Italie from 1954, where the marriage of an English couple visiting Naples falls apart.
“Rossellini was one of the first to mix fiction and documentary shots,” she says. “When you go to Stromboli, you think of his film, and when you rent a scooter in Italy, you think of Nanni Moretti. I was interested in bringing the journey closer to the cliché, in thinking about the images that shape our vision of romanticism.”
And it’s a strange kind of romanticism that Letourneur stages. She even offers Philippe Katherine his very first physical love scene in cinema — a daring proposition that, set to the suave music of Henri Salvador, never fails to make us burst out laughing. “I wanted to show the opposite of what we typically expect from representations of couples and their sexuality. It’s not so bad if we’re not in classic romanticism. What’s beautiful is perhaps just the representation of the bond, in all its fragility.”