Have you seen “A Difficult Year” and wondered how the ending scene was shot? We’ll explain!
Eighth feature film from the duo Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, A Difficult Year is currently in cinemas.
Carried by Pio Marmai, Jonathan Cohen, Noémie Merlant and Mathieu Amalric, the film follows Albert and Bruno, two over-indebted forty-year-olds who cross paths with young environmental activists. More attracted by the free beer and chips than by their arguments, they will gradually join the movement without conviction.
The directors had the idea for this film during confinement. During the Q&A organized after the screening of the film at Club AlloCiné, they explained:
“The idea for this film came about during the COVID pandemic which left us all flat-footed with this world on pause and made us question where we were. Many talked about the world after, the fact that we will be different, that we would consume differently, that we would travel differently…
There were no people after
But in the end there were no people afterward. The idea was to take a photograph of the time, of these two clashing world views. The film was drawn like this, in two blocks, in shot – reverse shot, in two movements, like a waltz.”
Gaumont Pio Marmai and Noémie Merlant
Eric Toledano told us about this during our meeting: “There is an idea of a loop and a waltz, of a waltz of ideas, we move from one idea to another. It is also a lot about bridges with the character of Madeleine, the bridge between generations, between two ways to see the existence and between the 2 worlds.”
And the image of the waltz remained until the end of the film.
Warning, the rest of this article contains spoilers about the end of “A Difficult Year”.
During the final sequence, Cactus (Noémie Merlant) comes out of the coma and Albert (Pio Marmaï) takes her for a walk in Paris and makes her dance on the Pont Louis Philippe to the song of Jacques Brel “The Waltz of a Thousand Beats“, in a Paris emptied of its inhabitants. The scene being supposed to take place during the Covid pandemic, it therefore does not shock the spectators.
Gaumont
A difficult year
A film shot after the pandemic
However, the feature film was filmed after the pandemic. Filming this sequence was therefore a real challenge for the team. Eric Toledano explains to our microphone how the team shot the end of A Difficult Year:
“We shot very early in the morning for 4 days. We were lucky it was the same weather. Pio and Noémie danced on the Louis Philippe Bridge. So we blocked the streets and we had 1 hour to shoot, then we had to release everything.“
This sequence was therefore filmed in 4 times an hour, which required the two actors to be very precise and for the scripts to do everything to avoid false connections (even if it meant ending up in the show of our national Michel and Michel ).
The most attentive spectators will have noticed the filmmakers’ nod to their series Arte En Thérapie, since we can see a poster of the series on a panel.
A difficult year is currently to be seen at the cinema.