“Adam is a man who died. When he was a teenager, he had a flame, then he wrote a book and then it went out.”says Erwan Le Duc about the main character of his series The world does not existplayed by Niels Schneider. Perhaps in order not to die, Erwan Le Duc one day escaped from Worldwhere he worked for several years as a journalist, before dedicating himself fully to cinema, a youthful passion that never abandoned him, even in his adventures as a good student at Sciences Po.
The turning point from one world to another was perhaps the short film Commissioner Perdrix does not make the trip in vainwhich opened the doors of the Emergence residence in 2013, a project incubator, then directed by Elisabeth Depardieu. She locates the author and encourages him to write what will be her first feature film, Partridge (2019). The film took a long time to prepare financially, but it went straight to Cannes. Its very good reception by critics in the Directors’ Fortnight guarantees a good projection in theaters and, above all, the possibility of Erwan Le Duc making a second film. Unpaid leave to film Partridge It becomes just leaving. In 2023 he directed the hilarious political satire for Arte under controlwritten by Charly Delwart. At the end of that same year, his second feature film, Her father’s daughteris released in theaters. At 46 years old, he is considered a new talent in French cinema.
From the big screen to the small one, he carries with him a universe tinged with gentle madness and characters a little out of place, a taste for peripheral France (the Vosges in Partridgethe Parisian suburbs in Her father’s daughtera small town in the north of The world does not exist), and the recurring face of Maud Wyler, “ [s]our favorite actress »which he has run since they met about ten years ago. “She navigates all the registers, both comedy and tragedy.He says of the one who is also the mother of his daughter, and I’ve been working a lot on this question of tone since I started writing and making movies. »
Disturbing strangeness
This taste for mixing environments comes from English comedy, inherited from a few years spent on the other side of the English Channel when he was a child, and, later, from his discovery of the films of Aki Kaurismäki and, in a genre darker, of Takeshi’s. Kitano. “They immediately pointed out to me that that tone between humor and darkness was special. This is what I love as a viewer, but I had a hard time convincing the funding committees at first. After PartridgeI finally had something installed, it was easier. »
You have 55.5% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
