It’s been ten years since we last heard from him. A maverick filmmaker, Catherine Breillat has lost none of her rage, her impetuosity, her insatiable appetite for truth. She returns to Last summerhis latest feature film, produced by Saïd Ben Saïd, a new story of poisonous passion under the inquisitive glare of the midday sun.
Your latest film deals with an incestuous relationship between a middle-aged woman and her stepson. But we understand that the subject is elsewhere…
It’s more complex, it’s about vertigo. The character of Anne, played by Léa Drucker, talks about it at one point: vertigo is not the fear of falling, but the temptation to fall. When we would rather fall than live in fear. I solve a lot of my problems like that. Before, I was very afraid of flying; the day I decided I was already dead before I took it, it cured me. It’s like infirmity [Catherine Breillat est hémiplégique depuis un accident vasculaire cérébral survenu en 2005]. It’s very unpleasant to be crippled and see that people think of you as a toad, old and ugly. The solution is to get ahead of them: see yourself as waste. So, we do worse than people. And we earn the right to indifference.
What did this adaptation of the Danish film “Queen of Hearts” (“Dronningen”, 2019), by May el-Toukhy, consist of, the basis of your film?
I didn’t change the Danish scenario much, there are even almost identical scenes and articulations, except that they don’t say the same thing at all. The Danish film was very first degree. I added the dimension of denial: my characters lie to themselves. You have to reread Musset or even The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. When you’re in love, you constantly lie to yourself and do catastrophic things.
What was it like returning to a film set ten years after your previous film, “Abuse of Weakness”?
I was very scared. I consider that each new film must be approached as a first film. We never know what we’re going to do, because a film is made with the flesh of the actors. It’s not like paint, we don’t have control over it. Our raw material is people, and we can find that absolutely immoral, because we use them as instruments, we transform them into fantasies, we extract emotions from them. Bodies don’t interest me that much, at least less than faces. A bare face is atrociously intimate, there is nothing more immodest.
You have 34.46% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.