There was a time when Emmanuel Mouret himself acted in his own films, a kind of French romantic comedies, let lucia do it (2000) until Whim (2015), a role tailor-made for a clumsy ingenue, falling with many errors in the round of feelings. And then, with Mademoiselle de Joncquières (2018), he retires behind the camera, dedicating himself completely to the other actors, of whom he brings together subtle combinations in each film. He finds the filmmaker on 13th Street.my district, in Paris, at the moment of a brief hallucination, he returns to his old character: playful hair, nose in the wind, dreamy half smile, jacket and scarf of a post-student, from a former teacher, but without having the ‘air’.
three friendsHis latest feature, presented at the Venice Film Festival in September, is a romantic escapade for three actresses (India Hair, Camille Cottin and Sara Forestier) on a wide spectrum from laughter to tears. “If the basic plot was rather tragic, I didn’t want to fall completely into melodrama.trusts Emmanuel Mouret. But rather to intertwine seriousness with fantasy, with comedy. Like Leo McCarey or Billy Wilder, we go from serious to light and only start with the movies we love. In painting we would talk about contrast, in music about counterpoint. »
The initial idea could be found in the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in The transparency society (PUF, 2017), a modern ideal that opposes a true society of trust. “It made me think that, in love, trust is not based on total transparency either. »
in isolation
From one term to the other, in fact, a space opens up that is conducive to the Mouretian imagination, that of loving inconsistencies and the circulations of desire. In his films one relationship always hides another, each couple makes a domino and pulls towards the triangular one. “The modern individual is still deeply dividedspecifies the filmmaker. On the one hand, society demands that you respect your commitments and, on the other, that you take your own wishes into account. » How to reconcile the two? “This question always interests fiction. The same thing happens in a couples movie as in a gangster movie: he who respects the rules of the clan, what happens the day he is forced to shoot his best friend? There is beginning to be cinema there. »
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