The Innocent: this Louis Garrel robbery comedy is partly autobiographical

mise en abyme

The story of L’Innocent is reminiscent of that of Louis Garrel and his mother, actress and director Brigitte Sy. She led theater workshops in prison and married a prisoner. She made this experience the subject of her first feature film, Hands Free.

According to Louis Garrel, “The Innocent is the story of this marriage from the son’s point of view. It’s a bit of a reverse shot.” He adds: “On the other hand, when my mother got married in prison, I was 18 years old, I was not there. Through this film, I therefore became embedded in her marriage!” Like his character, he spent a long time with prisoners during his adolescence, and got along well with his stepfather.

Despite the autobiographical base of this feature film, he did not want to make it an intimate chronicle but on the contrary to play with the genre, “including that of comedy. To avoid the pathos of the tragic dimension. The relationship of a mother to his son is a difficult thing to deal with in the cinema. It is easy to switch to the visceral. The more light-hearted one is, the better the film and the spectator are doing.”

A variety film

Les Tournelles Films

The film’s music is composed of great titles of French variety, such as Pour le Plaisir by Herbert Léonard, Nuit Magique by Catherine Lara, Another Story by Gérard Blanc or I Maschi by Gianni Nannini. It was a question of bathing in the musical universe of the character of the mother.

Louis Garrel explains: “François Truffaut used to say that people like pop songs because the sentences relate to everyone. The songwriters of pop songs, in two sentences, one has the impression that they are telling our story. I have tried to make a ‘variety’ film. Not just the variety of genres but a film in which everyone can recognize themselves.”

A long-standing project

Emmanuelle Firman

Originally, The Innocent was to be the second film by Louis Garrel and succeed Les Deux Amis but the scenario took time to mature. He has since directed L’Homme Fidèle and La Croisade.

Garrel began writing alone before being joined by Tanguy Viel, a writer of “existential detective novels who likes to seize the genre to tell intimate things”, then by Naïla Guiguet, with whom he had worked on The crusade. “All this time has been very beneficial for the script,” he says.

If Jean-Claude Carrière, faithful collaborator of Garrel, did not participate in the writing, he had nevertheless read the script: “He suggested two or three things to me, one of which I put in the film: the little cat who licks my shoe and eats the caviar when I’m at the cemetery. He also had very visual scriptwriting ideas.”

The title

Les Tournelles Films

The Innocent of the title refers to the character of Roschdy Zem then to that of Louis Garrel. The latter explains: “In a way, when you commit an offense for noble reasons, you are a little innocent. Which, I agree, is not very moral in the eyes of the law. It is the famous sentence pronounced in The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir, “What is terrible on this earth is that everyone has their reasons”.

Technical Adviser

Les Tournelles Films

Louis Garrel appealed to a former thug, Jean-Claude Pautot, who plays in the film the accomplice of Roschdy Zem and the one who directs the rehearsal of the household scene with Noemie Merlant and Garrel for the heist. This former prisoner who served 25 years in prison served as a kind of technical adviser on the set.

A model of the heist set was developed and Pautot rehearsed the scene with his friends, former mobsters, depending on the layout of the premises. “At the end of the day, I realize that if I take their indications into account and want to be realistic, I will not be able to film the scene. There comes a point, in terms of the perception of the scene, of time dilation , alternating editing with the rule of “during this time”, realism prevents cinema. It was an exciting work session, a necessary passage to arrive in the end at a geometry of cinema”, says the director.