But who was this little-known filmmaker, all smiles, who accompanied Isabelle Huppert during the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, which ended on Sunday August 28? This is Laurent Larivière, screenwriter and director born in 1972, versed in literary performance (notably with Olivia Rosenthal), whose second feature film, About Joan, will be released in theaters on Wednesday, September 14. A simple story, yet subtly out of whack: Isabelle Huppert embodies a woman revisiting moments of her life, the meeting with the father of her child, their sudden separation, her life as a young single mother, her son appearing and disappearing according to the scenes, as if memory were erasing or stitching up.
Enigmatic, the story captivates us with its implosion of capsized moments, and its characters wandering around Joan: Swann Arlaud, but also Dimitri Doré, revealed in Bruno Reidal, confession of a murderer, by Vincent Le Port, interpret the son at different ages; Lars Eidinger embodies a whimsical writer, in love with Joan; as for Huppert, she plays large parts of the heroine’s life, except for the young girl in her twenties (played by Freya Mavor), eager for adventures and falling for a cheeky handsome kid.
The Huppert mystery remains intact, or this elasticity of the actress, born in 1953, crossing the ages as one gets lost in the forest – to find oneself better? Sometimes digitized ageless beauty – Mrs. Hyde (2018), by Serge Bozon – sometimes delivered to the scalpel of the camera – Abuse of weakness (2014), by Catherine Breillat – the actress always seems to emerge stronger from her roles. Before leaving for Venice, where Jean-Paul Salomé’s film is presented, The Syndicalistin which she plays a CFDT delegate, Huppert confirms it to us: playing at the cinema, or at the theater, provokes a rise of sap.
What made you decide to play in Laurent Larivière’s second feature, “A propos de Joan”?
I played in many first or second films, and not the least, with Joachim Lafosse [Nue propriété, 2007]Alexandra Leclere [Les Sœurs fâchées, 2004] or even Ursula Meier [Home, 2008], to name just three. All revealed their talents and abilities, so I was not mistaken! With Laurent Larivière, there was the intuition of an encounter and the pleasure of reading the scenario, very romantic, with something literary.
At the beginning, it was not planned that I play so many periods of Joan’s life, but I proposed to Laurent to do a little more. What amused me was all these changes of state, and the freedom it allowed. I play all these identities, with a strangeness that is almost on the order of the fantastic. It’s a film about memory, but there’s the real memory of what happened and the completely imaginary memory, like a sort of fortress that Joan is building to resist. This makes it possible to offer lots of faces, and since I don’t really like the notion of a character in a film…
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