The Auteurs

The old—make that ancient—Charles Perrault fairy tale of Bluebeard seems such a natural text for the ever-provocative French filmmaker Catherine Breillat to twist into knots that one wonders why the notion of making a film of it didn't occur to Breillat sooner. As Breillat reveals below, the project had in fact been kicking around for a few years, and Breillat's visually stunning, droll, and yes, sometimes horrific realization of the tale proved one of the most bracing highlights of 2009's New York Film Festival. (New York was pretty much its last stop on the festival circuit; Daniel Kasman weighed in, most eloquently, on the film from Berlin earlier this year, here.)

Breillat suffered a stroke in 2004, and went on after that to make one of her best-received films, 2007's The Last Mistress. When I interviewed her in connection with that film in Toronto that year, she was frail, and had lost all of her English. It was good to see, interviewing her in New York in this last October, how much more she has recovered; she still walks with the assistance of a cane, but has gotten much of her English back. She prefers French, of course, and this interview was conducted with the assistance of interpreter Robert Gray. She looks one in the eye whenever she addresses a question, and on this occasion gave the impression that she could talk all night. She is a fierce artist, a fierce person. Caution: spoilers concerning Breillat's Bluebeard abound.

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• Glenn Kenny: I want to ask you how you found so many of these extraordinary and unusual performers; they're all so interesting, so off the beaten path of what we see in films.
  
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• Catherine Breillat: It's always the same. I do my casting at home. I invite young actors and actresses, young children over and I meet absolutely everyone who's around in Paris who's available. In fact, the young girl who plays Bluebeard's wife, I had already cast her for the part in 2005 and she was obviously a lot younger then, she was more childish. And I think the film might have been more scandalous! But after reading about 100 other actresses, I came back to her. Lola Créton. Even as a young girl she was absolutely extraordinary and...she was the only one I could find. I dreaded meeting her again after I met her for the first time in 2005, because I was certain that she'd be too old! But no.
  
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• Kenny: There's that wonderful shot where at the picnic Bluebeard is reclining against a tree and she's standing over him and you've got her front lit and back lit simultaneously and she dominates him in such a beautiful and subtle way. There's such a wonderful harmony between the visual dimension of that and the performance dimension of that.
  
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• Breillat: I did love that shot of her standing there, so slender and such a good girl figure, whereas there he was, the hugeness of Bluebeard. The shirt that he is wearing, by the way, is based on a reproduction of a painting by Clouet, of King François the First. And that was what we based his clothing on. But there his figure was absolutely colossal. He looks like a big cat or like some baby. And I thought the meeting was so extraordinary because it was a meeting of two solitudes, of two loners. Everyone's afraid of him and she sees him for what he is, for this very lonely character.
  
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• Kenny: There's this amazing difference of scale between her and Dominique Thomas, the actor playing Bluebeard. What is his background? Where does he come from? He's huge. He's enormous. Sometimes when they're together the difference between their bodies seems almost like a special effect.
  
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• Breillat: He's a stage actor in northern France.
  
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• Kenny: Who just happens to be that big.
  
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• Breillat: Absolutely. It was the same thing. I cast him the same way as I cast the young girls. I met all the huge men in France and I loved in him a sense of tenderness. I'm not sure if it comes across to non-French audiences, but his voice is absolutely sublime.
  
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• Kenny: Where did the framing story of two girls in the 20th century, the notion of them going up to the attic with its various forbidden components, how did that come to you as a place to stage what turns out to be a very fateful confrontation between a different set of sisters?
  
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• Breillat: It's funny, because in such stories the children usually go downstairs into a forbidden area. So I kept them shot in such a way that they actually go down a few stairs to finally reach the attic as a forbidden space. But I like the graphic elements of the attic. To me it was important that we have those beams at an angle, I thought was very visual, for the composition.
  
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• As a young girl, as a very young girl, I was especially taken with "Bluebeard" and I would read it together with my sister. And I was very proud of the fact that even though I was younger than her, she would be the one who would start to cry before me in reading that tale. And at the same time I actually find it so surprising that young girls of no more than six or seven read this tale in which they are taught to love the man who is going to kill them. However, in this version, she is the one who kills him. Here, she doesn't die because he takes a kind of pity on her. He's moved by her, and so he doesn't act quickly enough, he can't kill her. And that's why he hurries back so quickly. He knows that if she succumbs to temptation and goes to that gallery to see the murdered woman that he's going to be forced to kill her.
  
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• And when he discovers the truth, he's standing there with this huge sword and he weeps because after all he is going to have to...[SPOILERS DELETED!]
  
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• The film is also a tale about the superiority...of the grace...of young women over the power of colossal men. [Kind of the story of my own marriage—GK] Perrault's version of the tale is based on the Mother Goose tales. But it was also greatly inspired by a real historical figure, Gilles de Rais, who was a lord, a very powerful man, who killed mostly young boys, but also young women too, I believe. At the same time he was a contemporary and a good friend of Joan of Arc who was the Virgin of France, of course, the maid of France. And this is why I made Marie-Catherine, in my film, a young girl who is also a virgin; I wanted to be like Joan of Arc. And put her up against Gilles de Rais, this very important French lord, a very well known figure in French history, who happened to be a pedophile serial killer.
  
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• Kenny: These are all very, very fascinating correspondences and the world of this film is one that allows all these different correspondences to be drawn. There's something very enchanting and deeply ironic about the correspondences exchanges between the contemporary, or modern young girls, and those between the girls in the fairy tale. And this is another film, perhaps like À ma soeur! that's in a sense about your own relationship to your sister. People are coming out of the theater saying, "Oh, she's killed her sister again!"
  
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• Breillat: Well, the second daughter; the second sister; she always wants to kill—to eliminate the first.
  
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• Kenny: I was afraid to ask! I saw À ma soeur! in Toronto on I think September 9th of 2001 and everybody thought, what a marvelous film but the ending seemed kind of arbitrary. And then a few days later came a very strong realization of how arbitrary disaster can seem.
  
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• Breillat: It's funny you mention that because when I presented the film to the audience in Toronto for the official screening, I said, pay attention, because the next unexpected news item you see, the thing that is inconceivable that presents itself...you'll see that you're fascinated by that explosion of violence, the brutal violence. Violence is always brutal. And then 2 days later was September 11th. And the very ending of the film is in fact, funnily enough, based on a banal news story—not banal, but just the sort of news story that one reads in the papers fairly regularly. I added, of course, the line which says, "You'll believe me, believe me if you want."
  
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• Kenny: There's a wonderful scene in Bluebeard where Catherine and Marianne, the two modern girls, are talking about marriage, and it becomes this very unusual exchange where they talk about a married couple becoming homosexual, and Catherine is very enthusiastic and very insistent on this point. And there's something about their interaction, their interplay during that scene, that's so natural and so hilarious that it almost looks as if you had just turned the camera on them actually having some kind of conversation with each other. And so I wanted to ask you about shooting that scene.
  
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• Breillat: It's funny because Marilou Lopes-Benites was the first girl who I met casting the film and I immediately knew that I was interested in her. She knew how to read perfectly; both of them did! I was told that with the children I'd have to improvise, I couldn't get them to memorize so much dialogue, but both of them, when they arrived on set, they knew their text by heart. They could do 7 or 8 takes of the same scene and maintain the same sense of realism, the same sense of naturalism. Originally because I had been told that when you're working with children you can't really work with them for more than half a day. After that their attention span goes. So I planned to shoot the scenes with them in three days, but in fact we finished in two days. We were able to work until 8 P.M. at night with undiminished enthusiasm on their part. And I really felt there was a great sense of love between them and with me. And I hope one day to be able to shoot again with that young girl, with Marilou, the girl who plays Catherine. She was younger than most of the other actresses I met. I was afraid that she wouldn't be able to read, but in fact with these young kids today in France, they don't know how to read at all, but she could read perfectly and she was far better than the other girls who were slightly older than her. She was cast in the part, she got the part, she read the tale and was directing herself in the film. Since we finished shooting she keeps making me presents of drawings and paintings that she's done.
  
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• Kenny: What about the scene where she goes into the gallery and it's her, it's Catherine, it's not Marie-Catherine; she sees and walks on the blood-soaked floor. I wanted to ask about the design of that room. There's a certain art precedence that seemed to inform the design of it. And also just having that tiny girl, Marilou, in there. She's so wonderful, the way she just stands outside before she goes in, and then gingerly steps in the blood.
  
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• Breillat: The scene with the blood on the floor, it's something that I drew first as a painting. And I knew that I wanted 3 women, the presence of 3 women's bodies, whereas they're beautiful in itself. I also wanted Marilou in that role, then decided that she'd be the young girl. I was afraid that the her mother would refuse her to be able to play that part, it's so horrific. And during the night before we shot that scene, I came up with the idea that the young girl would be saying to herself, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid, as she walks through the legs of one of the hanging women. It always happens that I invent a lot right before I'm about to shoot. But when Marilou had seen the dead women she had seen them on set before she'd seen them being made up, so she knew how to distinguish between film and reality. And by the time I arrived on set for that scene, she'd made a drawing of the three women hanging. One thing I didn't foresee, however, is how slippery that blood would be on that floor.
  
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• Kenny: I've heard a rumor that you will be doing Sleeping Beauty next. Is that true? Is this a fairy tale that stimulates you as much as Bluebeard?
  
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• Breillat: Bluebeard is my favorite fairy tale. The scene of the pressing of the knife on the neck in it was typically me. The fact there was so much blood in the tale was also typical of me. But I'm interested in the tale of Sleeping Beauty since it's a symbol of adolescence and I think that that's also typically me. I going to choose to make the young girl fall asleep at the age of six, and have troubling disturbing frightening dreams until she wakes up at the age of 16 as a young girl. And to me I want to make it absolutely modern. I think there are resemblances with 36 fillette [Breillat's third feature, from 1988]. I also like the idea of taking this girl who falls asleep as a young girl telling herself scary tales who dreams like young girls do of fairy princess and having her wake up in an absolutely modern age, contemporary period, like in 36 fillette. I finished writing the script the day before yesterday. All of Perrault's tales are about 10 pages long so it's necessary to extrapolate what touches you and what their real inner meaning is.
  
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• Kenny: You got such wonderful period detail in this film using very sparse means. I suppose if you're shooting a film in Europe as a fairy tale, it's a little easier than doing it in the United States, because there are more castles. But besides that, there's a very creative and beautifully seamless evocation of period in the film.
  
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• Breillat: One of the reasons that I can do that is that I take a very personal approach to the art design. A lot of the things I bought for myself ahead of time because I like beautiful objects. For example, the sword I bought years ago. And the trunk is something that I bought in the period when I was shooting The Last Mistress.
  
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• Kenny: I remember when we talked about The Last Mistress you'd said many of the things that were in the film were also—it was the same thing—you had gotten them yourself.
  
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• Breillat: I always do that! As for locations, in this film I'd thought that I'd need four different locations. However, I found one castle and that was enough. The other locations were very close by. For example, Marie's room was in reality very close to the room in which you see the dead father and that made it easy to work. They could be working on the lighting for the one scene while shooting the other. And it's the same thing. For example, the hallway that you see in Bluebeard's castle, the corridor that you see in the convent, they're actually a continuation one of the other. I found the mother of the girls while we were shooting. She actually works on an assembly line and that's why she has the one hand by her face. It's so beautiful at the same time ravaged by the hard life she's led. And all the other actors aside from the leading actors I found in the region where we were shooting. And that was something that I said I would do because by using local actors you can save a lot of money. I always find the people shouldn't complain if you accept to do a film for a small budget, then you can't complain afterwards and whine and say, oh, it would have been so much better if I'd had more money. If you accept to do it, then you have to do it and do it for that. In fact I find it quite amusing to work under such constraints. It's always very stimulating.
  

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Categories: NYFF 09, Breillat