“Everything is linked”: why this actress waited 13 years before returning to the cinema?

What is it about ? François, future academician, is a famous writer. With a surgeon wife, a circle of high-ranking friends, his life would be a perfect happiness if he did not suffer from a terrible back pain which poisons his existence. When François, by the greatest of luck, meets the incredible Martha with healing hands, his back pain will ease.

He will become dependent on Martha’s hands, which soothe him more than any painkiller. Between these two characters an astonishing friendship is woven, with the opportunity for them to finally seize the best that life can offer them.

13 years after “Giving, Giving”

Since Giving, Giving (2010), Isabelle Mergault had not returned to directing because she was too busy with the theater: “Everything happened, including the periods when you needed to breathe a little, to take care of your loved ones. Being on the boards is my place, the place where I feel best. None annoyance in all this with the cinema where I arrived at the realization by chance, almost twenty years ago, when Michel Blanc asked me to direct “I find you very beautiful” of which I had written the screenplay”confides the director.

Birth of the project

Isabelle Mergault had to solve a big leg problem a few years ago. After consulting numerous specialists who ended up concluding that the evil was in her head, the filmmaker went to see a healer (although she comes from a family of allopathic doctors!): “In fact, I had got lost on a road in Normandy, like in the film, I saw her poster, I showed up at her house and when I got out I was no longer limping.”

“I developed a story from this starting point by wanting to confront two people gifted with their hands, one because he writes, the other because she heals. Two people who don’t have not much in common. I wanted to make this intellectual someone who becomes dependent on a bonesetter. It came like that, I wrote very quickly, without a plan, I had a dialogue, without necessarily knowing where I was going. Without a planned end”she recalls.

The choice of tandem

Isabelle Mergault first thought of Lambert Wilson because of his elegance. Then, she chose Josiane Balasko for her popular side. “And she said yes. I like this duo that you can believe in. Josiane is obviously more cultured than Martha but I think they have in common a form of elegance from the heart. I had the chance to ‘to have two film personalities who know how to do everything in the field of emotion, including the big difference between laughter and tears’remembers the director.

David KOSKAS

Shooting in Normandy

Isabelle Mergault filmed Des mains en or during the summer of 2022 in Normandy. The filmmaker indeed adores the Côte de Nacre: “I went there for fifteen years, I rented a house there. I often took my daughter there, but on this coast the sea is never where you expect it. she goes back up and she got tired of it. We shot in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer in the restaurant “Le Crabe vert” – renamed “Les Mouettes” in the film – whose owner I know very well and where I regularly went to lunch.”

Get out of confinement

Isabelle Mergault likes to tell stories in which people are, at the start, locked in social or emotional shackles and from which they manage to get out thanks to encounters that transform them: “These are unfortunate people who have not been touched by the grace of love or care or because they have not met the right people and that upsets me.”

“François, revealed by the grace of Matha, becomes human. In fact, she gives birth to him like a maieutician of this humanity which was there, buried, and which could never have come out, perhaps out of fear or because the others l bored. I am myself like that, I have not been released. It is only by writing that I find happiness, that I manage to get out of my existence”develops the filmmaker.