with “Les Âmes sœurs”, André Téchiné signs his 30th feature film

André Téchiné is a director, filmmaker and above all a fan of the seventh art. First as a critic for Cinema notebooks and then there was scriptwriting, a few productions, training at the Institute for Advanced Film Studies (IDHEC). His birth as a director will take place with Memories in France, in 1975, with an inhabited Jeanne Moreau and Marie-France Pisier. And then there was Baroque with Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu (1976). His first big budget films: The Bronte sisters (1979) or even Hotel of the Americas in 1981 with Catherine Deneuve, a collaboration that will last.

>> André Téchiné: “Soulmates is the story of a woman who, by treating someone, heals herself”

This Wednesday, April 12, 2023, he is releasing his new film Soul mates with Noémie Merlant, Benjamin Voisin, Audrey Dana and André Marcon. This is the story of a lieutenant of the French forces engaged in Mali, seriously injured in an explosion during an intervention. He is repatriated to France and will be accompanied by Jeanne, his sister, during his long convalescence, which will focus in particular on his amnesia.

franceinfo: Your film Soul mates isn’t it finally above all a focus on the work of memory, on memory?

André Techine: Yes that’s it. It’s about memory and it’s about memory through care. I wrote this film during the Covid period when there was a lot of talk about taking care of others. And the film is undoubtedly marked by this since it is the story of a sister who will want to take care of her brother and fight so that he manages to get back on his feet. That’s exciting for a filmmaker because a filmmaker always wants to do things for the first time, and here I had the opportunity of a character who was doing everything for the first time and his sister who was by his side. But she obviously with a lag since she could refer to a past of which she was the sole depositary.

When you shoot, do you do things as if it were the first time? Still with your childish eyes?

That’s the dream! It’s exactly that. That is to say that I do not feel at all, despite my age, experienced. Each time, I approach a film as a completely new adventure, human since I’m going to meet people, artistic because I’m going to embark on a project without really knowing what I’m going to discover. And there, it was great because I crossed step by step with these characters who were also walking in the unknown. And it was very stimulating for all of us.

I wanted to know when you understood that you were going to make films. Does it go back to childhood?

Without a doubt. I had a very provincial childhood. Isolated, you might say. I was not very sociable and the cinema was the only key, it was the keyhole. I could imagine other worlds, other lives, other relationships. Finally, it was really the escape. It made me dream. There was a kind of opposition because I saw a lot of French films, but there, curiously, I didn’t really want to resemble this French cinema and its characters.

I preferred to look like Gary Cooper than Jean Gabin when I was little.

André Techine

at franceinfo

Has the cinema allowed you to tell your stories, to do you good, to lighten your mood?

For me it was magic and I think now what I do on my side, with my team, with the people I choose, it’s like when we play as a child and we take the game and the companions very seriously. We perform magical operations. And my dream, of course, is always to involve the spectators in this magic.

You were able to tackle subjects that were really taboo, subjects that often made people angry: divorce, adultery, prostitution, delinquency, drug addiction, homosexuality, AIDS… That’s also what being a filmmaker is, try to change mentalities?

It’s a vision that we can have, but it’s a vision that seems very optimistic to me. I’m a little more skeptical than you.

I’m not sure that cinema can change the world, but on the other hand, I think it can put sounds and images where there aren’t any, to put representations precisely where they are lacking.

André Techine

at franceinfo

Does the fact that wild reedsin 1994, allowed you to obtain two Césars, that of the best director and that of the best screenplay, appeased you?

No, because if there is something that I dread and that scares me, it’s dead calm. And it’s also a driving force for the films I make. It is all the same a taste or a desire for the fight. I think that the day I will have lost it, I’m not sure that I would still want to make films, quite simply.

What has cinema brought you?

It brought me all this magic operation with all the same the possibility of having a job, which was as far as I was concerned very uncertain. And then also, despite everything, without emphasis, dealing with these little stories that were not represented. Put images and sounds on what we didn’t see and on what we didn’t show.