They are in Cannes for their first feature film, Nothing to give a fuck, selected for Critics’ Week. A film about a 26-year-old girl, Cassandre (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a flight attendant in a low-cost company, whose life appears as a series of snapshots, flights and stopovers succeeding each other in an infinite present time. Emmanuel Marre, 41, and Julie Lecoustre, 33, as a couple in life, speak with one voice. When one speaks, the other listens, then clarifies or prolongs the point. The dialogue is taking place without our needing to relaunch it often. Hours could have gone by like this.
The agreement led them to work together, for the first time in 2016, on a short film, From one castle to another (2018), multiple awards at festivals. It is simple. Based on a common vision of the profession and the artisanal way of exercising it. But also on the particular interest which they carry in the political, the social, in the small things of the existence which they do not cease to observe. Even absorb, to then restore it in a dense way, in concentrated blocks. “We spend our time, in life, capturing sound fragments, gestures, bodies, sentences that we hear. And when we’re not together, we text them to each other ”, she says.
Julie Lecoustre, director: “We spend our time, in life, capturing sound fragments, gestures, bodies, sentences that we hear”
It makes : “I like to go and look at the details that we don’t pay attention to and yet which make up 80% of our lives. I am a deeply melancholy person, so I have a complicated past. I am always afraid that things will go away. I see all my films as an archive. Each of them represents for me the souvenir photo of an experience, rather than something mastered at the start. “
It is therefore the image of an air hostess, crossed on a flight to Barcelona, which is at the origin of Nothing to give a fuck. “She was sitting across from me, I watched her during take-off and obviously she was badly, apparently suffering from a deep wound., remembers Emmanuel Marre. And then, there was the “ding”, she unhooked her belt and, there, another image appeared, she put on a huge smile, started to take out the drinks cart, to serve… The dichotomy between this moment of introspection and this professional agitation was powerful and brought up a question: what did she leave on the ground, this young woman, before flying away. “
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