With “I Love America”, a film available on Amazon Prime Video, Sophie Marceau reunites, after “LOL” and “A meeting” with director Lisa Azuelos. The latter was inspired by her own life to stage this new comedy.
To nourish her films, director Lisa Azuelos has always drawn inspiration from her own life. In LOL and Mon Bébé, she depicts a mother-daughter relationship during two very distinct periods and in Une Rencontre, she plunges into an extramarital love story. I Love America, his latest feature film, is no exception to the rule.
This time, the director is interested in her own mother, the singer Marie Laforêt. As in her romantic comedy with Sophie Marceau, Lisa Azuelos has also left for the United States to try her luck. It is moreover in this way that the idea ofI Love America was born.
“When I arrived in the USA in September 2019, I thought I would settle there and do series as a director. I applied for my work visa and thought I had nothing more personal to say, remembers the filmmaker in the press kit. (…) And then, everything happened like in the movie. I was staging a disco musical in New York and I got a call from my sister saying my mom was leaving. I took the first plane to Paris.”
I wasn’t afraid to say intimate things.
Marie Laforêt dies three hours after her arrival in France, on November 2, 2019. Her writing project in America changes radically. “I didn’t think I was going to talk about my childhood. Even less of my mothershe continues. As the writing progressed, flashbacks imposed themselves and I understood that I was going to write about the link to love.”
She clarifies: “If you think about it, all my films are only about that. But there, I was able to go a little further because my mother was gone, I was not afraid to say intimate things. I had talked about it with her but I wouldn’t have dared to make this film during her lifetime, I think..”
In his flashback scenes, Lisa Azuelos expresses the absence and lack of this difficult and famous mother. She concludes: “The care received, the love given, the love missed, the way we were touched or not, that’s what marks our relationship with others. Is it a bond of trust? Of defiance? Of love ? Lack? I wanted to dissect this relationship to oneself and to others, the links of the body…”
I Love America is available on Amazon Prime Video.