Delphine Deloget’s first feature film, “Rien à perd” was released in theaters this week. On this occasion, here are five things to know about this social drama carried by Virginie Efira.
What is it about ? Sylvie lives in Brest with her two children, Sofiane and Jean-Jacques. One night, Sofiane is injured while he is alone in the apartment. Social services are alerted and place the child in a home while they carry out an investigation. Convinced of being the victim of a miscarriage of justice, Sylvie launches into a fight to get her son back.
This is the cinema nugget of the week: Virginie Efira is a mother who has “nothing to lose”
Félix Lefebvre gained 20 kilos!
Jean-Jacques, one of the two sons of the character of mother courage played by Virginie Efira, is played by Félix Lefebvre, who was revealed thanks to Summer 85 (2020) by François Ozon. To play this bulimic and anxious teenager (almost young adult), this popular actor (also seen as manager of the NTM in the biopic Suprêmes and as the lover of Cécile de France in the drama La Passagère) gained 20 kilos:
“I was overwhelmed by the sensitivity of this magnificent role, his look, his way of interacting. He is in a need to help and never puts his problems on the table but inside him, it works . It is for all these reasons that I wanted to invest myself physically to interpret it better”confided Félix at the microphone of AlloCiné, during the presentation of Nothing to lose in Cannes in the Un certain regard selection.
César 2024: they are in Le Consentement, Flo… Who are the revelations of the year?
To find the interpreter of Jean-Jacques, director Delphine Deloget first did a wild casting call, but quickly understood that she needed an actor with experience: “I wanted to film a boy with weight problems and more particularly bulimia. Félix followed me in this idea. He took on the role, offered to gain kilos, almost 20! ‘is impressively invested.”
“In the film, it is a problem from the past that Jean-Jacques has dominated, but which remains latent. What does this fault say about him, about his relationship to life, to his mother? Is it a psychological problem, a family trauma or a difficulty of being which should not look for a cause? I had in mind the image of a documentary, Armand, fifteen years old in the summer of Blaise Harrison, with a boy a little round, enigmatic.”
2023 Curiosa Films Félix Lefebvre, Alexis Tonetti and Virginie Efira
A first feature film
Nothing to Lose is the first feature film by Delphine Deloget, who directed two short fiction films (Santa Claus and the Cowboy in 2012 and Tiger in 2019). She confides: “Originally, I come from documentary, I have made both journalistic documentaries and so-called ‘auteur’ documentaries with forms that sometimes borrow from fiction (like Voyage en Barbarie which won the Albert Londres Prize) . I see this feature film as a logical continuation of my work. In fiction, there is another way of working and it is not the same constraints.”
“But, in documentary as in fiction, it is the same questions of cinema that arise: the point of view, the questions of staging, finding a visual form, how to go beyond a subject to make a story universal… Pour Rien à losing, I really wanted to work with actors, to create characters, to create a universe, that was my primary motivation, it even came before the desire to tell a story.”
Napoleon: what start for the film with Joaquin Phoenix at the French box office?
Virginie Efira, obvious
Delphine Deloget offered the role of Sylvie to Virginie Efira in 2019: “She was very patient. She could have given up since the funding was slow, but no, she had unfailing commitment. I was very touched by the confidence she had and maintained throughout these years. Starting on a first film also means venturing into a less financed, more chaotic project”recalls the director, continuing:
“She was there. Virginie is a person who reflects with her doubts before each scene, then is capable of playing with quite astonishing certainty. As she delivers a precise score, it was quite enjoyable during filming to shift, to push cursors, to sometimes look into burlesque or humor in certain scenes. She has something of Gena Rowlands, but I thought of Jack Nicholson while watching her.”
10 films to see at the cinema from November 22: Napoleon, Nothing to Lose…
Document yourself
Delphine Deloget met dozens of families of children in care and listened to audio recordings between parents and social services. The director also spoke at length with lawyers who handle these types of cases and spent several days in the office of a juvenile judge. She remembers:
“A dive into human complexity which allowed me to dispel certain preconceived ideas. When we talk about placement, we imagine the worst: incest, mistreatment, abuse… However, 70% to 80% of placements of children are ordained following what social services call ‘failure’: a dirty word to talk about disoriented parents, difficult children to manage, educational deficiency, unsuitable housing, families in debt…”
Why Brest?
Delphine Deloget wanted to film this story in a separate territory, a land where dreams have a horizon but come up against a particular geography: “Brest is the end of the world. After Brest, there is nothing left, just emptiness. Brest is a student, military, port city. It is a restrictive city due to its weather, its geography, its post-war architecture, but it is also a city that lets its characters breathe in open landscapes.”
“Brest is also an underground city that loves the night and music. And I liked the idea of filming this story – like a difficult day after a party.”