Why is the eighth feature film by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache called “A Difficult Year”? The two directors answer us on the subject.
Four years after Hors Normes, here is A Difficult Year. This is the eighth feature film directed by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, as a duo, in just under twenty years. Pio Marmaï, Noémie Merlant and Jonathan Cohen star in this comedy about overconsumption or the climate emergency.
And it doesn’t take long to understand the meaning of this new film, since it is repeated several times in the opening scene: a montage of presidential speeches from December 31 in which the phrase “difficult year” comes back systematically.
An introduction tinged with irony which plays on the comedy of repetition. And which is the result of a nice coincidence: “We were invited on a TV show [“Quotidien” comme ils l’ont révélé dans une autre interview, ndlr] where they do these kinds of little montages”Olivier Nakache explains to us on the sidelines of the preview organized for the AlloCiné Club. “It gave us the idea to go further, to dig, to look.”
“And when we saw that this word came back like that, like a sort of mantra, we said to ourselves that it was a title that we liked and referred to Italian comedies. It’s a title full of paradoxes . Full of contradictions compared to the film: it’s a comedy but it’s called ‘A Difficult Year’, so as not to omit the tough subjects that are tackled there. So it established itself very, very quickly.”
See you in a little over two months, on December 31, to see if a new excerpt can be added in the montage that opens A Difficult Year.
Comments collected by Maximilien Pierrette in Paris on September 18, 2023