Brandon Judell
Patrice Leconte Gets Intimate
The release of director Patrice Leconte's latest celluloid-delving into human nature, "Intimate Strangers," has been cause enough for the nation's critics to start concocting hosannas on his behalf.
Arthur Lazere of culturevulture.net notes: "If the French had an equivalent of the Japanese 'Living National Treasures,' film director Patrice Leconte would surely rank high on the list."
Roger Ebert in his Chicago Sun Times column chimes in with: "Leconte is not famous, but he is addictive. You could do worse than hole up for a weekend with a half a dozen of his films, also including 'Ridicule,' 'The Girl on the Bridge,' 'The Widow of Saint-Pierre,' and 'The Man on the Train.'"
Viewing "Intimate Strangers" will no doubt convince you to devise a few of your own.
This pleasurable, simple tale is part romance, part thriller.
A woman, Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire), has made an appointment with a therapist because of her troubled marriage. When she arrives for her first session, she accidentally sets foot into the nearby office of William (Fabrice Luchini), a financial advisor.
Immediately, Anna starts letting lose with her most intimate problems, many sexual. William quickly realizes that some mistake has occurred, but between not wanting to embarrass this anguished woman and his growing interest in the marital details she's sharing, he lets the "session" continue . . . and then he allows a second encounter and a third.
Will love pursue this comedy of errors, or revenge and murder?
My lips are sealed, but Mr. Leconte's weren't during a recent interview with New York Theatre Wire. If the following conversation comes off grammatically imprecise at times, it's simply because Leconte's English is not as perfect as his directorial skills. A translator was standing by, but was only infrequently called for.
NYTW: You have the same frequency of output with your films as does Woody Allen. How do you produce so much quality product?
PL: You can't compare us except for frequency. Woody makes a new film each year . . . a new one, a new one, and so on. And maybe it's too much. I don't say it at all. And more or less, I do the same thing.
Each person has his own rhythm. I can't work slower because I have a lot of different ideas. I'm very impatient to start my new project. It's a question of energy. When I imagine the future of my life, my working life, I imagine one day or another I will stop doing movies instead of making them slower and slower because it's a question of appetite.
NYTW: So what would you do if you weren't making films?
PL: I have a lot of things to do. To travel, for example. I always travel for my work: to promote, to shoot. But I have some travels to do with my wife before we become too old. But first of all, I'd like to write for the stage a play. I have some ideas about it. But I need time, and I don't have time for the moment. I'd like to live a more . . . not a more pleasant life. . . because my life is very pleasant for the moment. I would like to change my life to a quiet one. Sometimes I want time to live.
NYTW: Plato said we were once whole beings, then the gods cut us into half, and now for the rest of our lives we're trying to find the opposite part. You've been happily married for 30 years, so you might be a "whole" now. As for your films, they always seem to be about two people who are trying to get together. In your work, are you trying to make your characters as happy as you are with your wife?
PL: You know my private life is my private life. My movies are never autobiographic except on the emotional level. You have to feel strongly by yourself the emotion you want to put on the screen if you want to have a chance to share it with audiences. I have to feel those kind of things if I want to share it. In my life . . . because you want to speak about it . . . unfortunately my wife is not here, but I'm a specimen for "Jurassic Park." Why? Because I'm married for 33 years with the same woman. When you are together for so much years, you have to cross a lot of thunderballs . . . hurricanes.
NYTW: This movie deals with a relationship that sort of starts one way, and begins to turn. It's very carefully strategized.
PL: There's a kind of Hitchcock touch. First of all at the beginning of the movie, the music references a Bernard Hermann score from "Vertigo." And the darkness, and this woman, who is she? It's more or less a kind of thriller a la a Hitchcock movie. For me, this movie is first of all a love story, but because it's a love story and more or less a Hitchcock movie at the same time, for me it's a sentimental thriller. I like this sticker: a sentimental thriller. I'm sorry. I had a very clever answer for you, and I forgot the precise question. Also I'm a bit tired.
NYTW: You are known for your subtle touch. Can you explain your approach to cinema?
PL: Cinema is the art about pictures, nevertheless, cinema is better for my taste to suggest than to show. If I want to show, I'm not interested in it at all. I prefer to imagine the increase of desire by the silent moments and then in just a few words. The best moment of a love story is when we go up the stairs. After, in the bedroom, it's not so bad either, but the best moment is the moment during the time of seduction, design, and so on. In "Intimate Strangers," the two characters, the man and the woman, are in the same room alone, and it works. You feel this strange perfume of desire flying above their heads. Maybe they are in love. Maybe not. You don't know. and I like it.
NYTW: In "Lumiere" and "Company," you along with dozens of other directors made shorts using one of the first movie cameras ever made. Do you think film has progressed from it's creation one hundred years ago? Woody Allen, to mention him again, said in the future, new movies will be projected into people's houses, and for the communal experience, audiences will go to the theater. Do you agree? And has film changed at all from its inception?
PL: I think Woody's right to say it. In the future, maybe movie theaters will not exist no more. I hope I don't live long enough to know it. Because when I grew up in Provence, I went to the cinema to watch movies in the middle of an audience in the first row, and that was with a large screen and a huge sound.
I don't know if we can screen directly into your eyes the future movies, but I know the movies will arrive in your flat, in your home. It's a little bit sad for me to imagine it, but I think it's normal. It's not so sad because even if you screen the movies on your walls at home, you always need actors, stories, directors and so on. Even if the pictures are on your wall, they need us to do it. But I prefer to imagine my work first of all in theaters. [Judell]
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