Now 37, a graduate of La Fémis, Léonor Serraille found herself at the Cannes Film Festival from her first feature film, Young woman (2017), which won the Camera d’Or. She doubles the bet, in competition this time, with A little brother in 2022. Two stories of women fiercely fighting for their freedom. The first follows a precarious and somewhat crazy thirty-year-old (Lætitia Dosch) in the streets of Paris on Gil Evans (las vegas tango). The second follows in the footsteps of a young African mother, Rose (Annabelle Lengronne), recently landed with her two children in the Parisian suburbs, on Jean-Sébastien Bach (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude and Fugue No. 14 in F sharp minor). Nothing surprising, as the art of counterpoint can be defined as one of the most beautiful assets of Léonor Serraille’s cinema.
The freedom, spiritual and sexual, of Rose, the film’s main character, is the most visible element of your film. But does it, itself, come from your own freedom of staging?
The writing process is a bit, for me, like the creation of a family, in which we must above all believe as a family and as an individual. It is essential to build a bridge between the character and the viewer. My sister, for example, has to be able to recognize herself in Rose, otherwise it’s a waste of time. Suddenly, the questions of the subject, of politics, of the origin of the characters, of the color of the skin, fade away little by little in favor of the subject of the family, which is precisely the one that interests me. I have nothing special to say about blacks in fact, but much more about individuals, who are always a plurality of things.
In doing so, aren’t you afraid of erasing the socio-political parameters that determine your characters?
To bring them back there more than I do would be to shoot another film. I didn’t want a militant film, even if I think it’s justified. I wanted to be able to tell this woman in various intimate aspects, her relationship to her work, her relationship to her children, but also her sentimental life, she is entitled to it. What matters to me is that the social status or the origins of a character do not always command the same type of representation. There is actually no good reason for this.
Where does this softness come from in your film, the quotes from Pascal, Flaubert or Rimbaud, or even the use of the “Well-tempered Clavier” by Jean-Sébastien Bach?
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