On the occasion of the release of “Hors-saison”, here are five things to know about this melancholic film by Stéphane Brizé, starring Guillaume Canet and Alba Rohrwacher.
What is it about ? Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice lives in a small seaside town in the west of France. He is in his fifties, he is a well-known actor. She is over forty, she is a piano teacher. They fell in love around fifteen years ago. Then separated. Since then, time has passed, everyone has gone their own way and the wounds have closed little by little. When Mathieu comes to dilute his melancholy in the whirlpool baths of a thalassotherapy center, he finds Alice by chance.
A feeling of disillusionment
Hors-season is the tenth feature film by Stéphane Brizé. The prevailing feeling when he thought of making this film is the same one that belongs to all his main characters from The Law of the Market to Another World: disillusionment. He says : “All these characters believed in something, they all had a certain idea of the world and of Man. And then, their outlook was changed after betrayal and abandonment. Whether it came from the company or of the family. This ultimately represents quite a few years of intimately following the same journey as my characters and therefore symbolically taking the same blows as them.”
“I obviously wrote and directed these films to acquire more clairvoyance. But there are no advantages without disadvantages and clairvoyance weakens. I then needed to question this moment when I was exhausted by the anger on which these films were built.”
The choice of Guillaume Canet
Stéphane Brizé sees fiction as a documentary about the actors with whom he works. The director explains the choice of Guillaume Canet for the character of Mathieu: “What resonates with me about Guillaume Canet is his infinite melancholy. I have always felt him as a deeply sad man with a lot of talent for hiding it. This touches me enormously. Guillaume is a much more complex being than this that he perhaps seems to be. He was also the age of the role, the passage of time suits him well and he has an enormous capacity for self-mockery. It was essential to agree to take a good stroll third of the film in a bathrobe between whirlpool baths and seaweed wraps.”
“I dealt with an exceptional actor, very simple – this is important to me – very serious, very invested and very deep. He is one of those who is not afraid to let himself be taken into his own zone. “discomfort and insecurity. With an actress opposite him, also exceptional.”
Guillaume Canet telephones Vincent Lindon
With Hors-saison, Guillaume Canet works for the first time with Stéphane Brizé, who used to film with Vincent Lindon, as evidenced by their collaborations on the dramas Mademoiselle Chambon, Few Hours of Spring, The law of the marketAt war and Another world. When contacted by Brizé, Canet telephoned Lindon to avoid any misunderstanding. In an interview he gave to Léa Salamé on France Inter, he said:
“I really like Vincent and I called him, not to apologize, but to tell him that I was a little… But I think there was no problem, they obviously talked between them before. It wasn’t a deception. I can understand Stéphane’s desire to renew himself, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t make more films together.”
2024 Alamodefilm Guillaume Canet and Alba Rohrwacher
2 main settings
The hotel and the seaside resort were designed as characters in their own right. Stéphane Brizé notes: “In this film, the sets are no longer only seen as interior or exterior spaces which host the scenes, but also as the expression of the psyche of the characters. I had never really known how to do that before. The immense hotel with sanitized luxury also seen as a metaphor for the perfection of a world (that of the character played by Guillaume) in which he is no longer happy.”
“And the sleepy seaside town seen as a parenthesis in a cycle. Things have happened in the streets, more will happen soon, but in this period in between, there is emptiness. A place without tumult which leaves room for introspection. Which also imposes it, no doubt.”
Feeling of stillness
For the production of Hors-saison, Stéphane Brizé felt the need to take the camera off the shoulder of cinematographer Antoine Héberlé (unlike his four previous films) and place it on a stand. The objective: to translate this feeling of immobility felt by the characters. The filmmaker remembers: “It was on the one hand, for the character of Guillaume, about translating the idea of a crushing, of putting him at the center of interior and exterior geographies too big for him.”
“The idea also through these shots of a shift on his pain and his doubts to make them both tragic and ridiculous. How Sempé’s characters seem lost in a world too big for them.”