Louis Garrel’s The Innocent to screen at French Film Festival
French actor and director Louis Garrel’s acclaimed new movie, The Innocent, is a highlight of the French Film Festival.
Louis Garrel first made his mark with English-language audiences in Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotically charged film about the 1968 Paris riots, The Dreamers, co-starring Michael Pitt and Eva Green, a future Bond girl.
Well before then, he’d had his first on-screen role at age six in his father Philippe Garrel’s film, Emergency Kisses, alongside his mother, Brigitte Sy.
Being the son of nouvelle vague filmmakers, Garrel, 39, was of course determined to get behind the camera, as well as continue with his acting career. One of France’s sexiest actors, he had a prominent role as Jean-Luc Godard in Redoubtable, the 2017 biopic of the famous auteur by Michel Hazanavicius. He’s appeared in the films of his former girlfriend, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and portrayed Alfred Dreyfus in Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy. Garrel also has directed four features and three short films, two of them with his previous girlfriend, Golshifteh Farahani, in the cast.
Two of the features starred his now wife Laetitia Casta as a character called Marianne, a reference to the supermodel being chosen as the face of France’s national symbol. In all four features Garrel plays a character called Abel.
With his latest feature, The Innocent, he draws on an aspect of his own family. The central character, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), is partly based on his mother. After Garrel’s parents divorced, his mother had a prison wedding with an inmate and her son has now made a film drawing on the episode. Screening in the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival in March, The Innocent has struck a chord with audiences with its humour, warmth and spot-on casting. It has just been nominated for 11 Cesar awards in France.
“My mother worked for 20 years directing plays and cinema in a prison,” Garrel recalls after the film’s Cannes premiere.
He doesn’t go into the specifics of his mother’s marriage, which he was not allowed to attend as he was a minor at the time.
“I was a kid and I met so many people in this world and I was super interested about their marginality,” he says.
“This was the starting point for the story. I didn’t want to make a chronicle and I decided to play with different genres, the romantic comedy and the thriller, so it would be easy for audiences to watch. I wanted it to be like a game, to surprise them. The thing I feared most was that it would be boring.”
The Innocent, which Garrel co-wrote with Tanguy Veil, follows Michel (Roschdy Zem) as he is released from prison and sets up his life on the outside with his new wife. Abel (Garrel) remains unconvinced that Michel will give up his old ways and becomes a kind of sleuth together with his friend, Clemence (Noemie Merlant). When Michel becomes involved in a robbery, all hell breaks loose.
It’s hard not to root for Michel. Zem often plays authority figures on screen (such as in Oh Mercy!), and in this film he has a more romantic role than we are used to seeing from him. Merlant, as Clemence, is the opposite of her restrained character in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Here, she is sassy and funny and was a casting coup for the filmmaker.
“Noemie didn’t know if she could be so burlesque, because she’d never played a role like this,” Garrel recalls. “But I had a feeling she could do it and she trusted me. My intuition is that you can play strong and be funny and still be truthful. I’m not a fan of naturalism.”
Garrel says people go to the movies to watch a great performance and Grinberg – who also appears in Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12th, the best film winner at the Lumiere Awards – delivers such a virtuosic turn as Sylvie.
“Sylvie’s so much in love, she’s so alive, so free and radiates from within,” Grinberg says. “For the first time a director saw the sun and the light in me.”
What did Garrel’s mother think of the film, given it is partly based on her experiences?
“She had read the script, so she didn’t discover it in Cannes, but she did in a way,” her son responds. “She had mixed feelings, I guess.”
Garrel is particularly proud of the robbery scene, which he admits is a bit cartoonish, a comedy caper.
“Audiences experience many different kinds of emotions and are lost, exactly like my characters are lost regarding what is going on,” he says.
“A producer friend who wrote the script in a previous version said to me, ‘Don’t try to imitate the Americans, because you’ll fail and it would be ridiculous’. So I wanted to make a French robbery with feelings – love and everything – in a robbery scene. I wanted to talk about something I know very well.”
As to why he calls himself Abel in his movies he says it’s his alter ego, like a mask: “It helps me to do something that even I do not know.”
The acting roles continue for Garrel and, as usual, they are varied. In Scarlet, he plays an aviator whose plane crashes and he is rescued by a gorgeous country girl. “Maybe the little moustache is sexy,” he chuckles.
In Forever Young, he has again collaborated with Bruni Tedeschi for a film about her years in drama school, where she was taught by famed French director Patrice Chereau (played by Garrel).
“He was so full of life and was so passionate about his work in the theatre, opera and cinema,” Garrel says. “Valeria knew him well.”
He also has several high-profile historical projects in the can. In Caravaggio’s Shadow he plays the shadow, a priest from the Inquisition. “He’s a bad priest, for sure,” he says. “Bad guys are fun to play and more interesting sometimes.”
And there are two blockbuster instalments of The Three Musketeers where he reunites with Eva Green and plays Louis XIII.
“I have a wig and a moustache and I pretend to be the King of France,” he says with the enthusiasm of a big kid. “The story of the royalty in France is so violent, but I didn’t know everything about Louis XIII, because I was so bad at school. I read a biography about his life and it was like a Shakespearean tragedy.”
As for English-language projects, Garrel is not so keen. He had small roles in Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival (sending himself up as Philippe, a pretentious French auteur) and as charming, boyish Professor Bhaer in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. “It was fantastic to work with different actors who come from a different world,” he says, but his career is firmly planted in French cinema. “Why cast a Frenchman when there are so many good American actors?”
Most recently he starred alongside his sister, Esther, in his father’s film, The Plough, about a family who run a travelling puppet show.
Seems that Garrel likes to keep it all in the family.
The French Film Festival plays in capital cities and some regional centres from March 7-April 25. Full program on sale on February 9, at the festival website.
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Ooh la-la, get ready for the best of French cinema
The Alliance Francaise French Film Festival is the biggest showcase of French film outside France and there is something for everyone, from the opening night feature, Masquerade, to French box-office hits November and The Innocent, and France’s official entry for best international feature in the Academy Awards, Saint Omer. For many film buffs, it’s a chance to catch up with favourite actors from the big and small screen.
Laure Calamy
Since winning hearts in Call My Agent!, Calamy has gone from strength to strength. She won the best actress Cesar (French Oscar) for her role as Antoinette in My Donkey, My Lover & I, and a best actress prize at Venice for Full Time. This year she has two festival films. Two Tickets to Greece sees Calamy at her comic best as a lusty young woman who travels with adour childhood friend to the Cyclades islands, where she hooks up with a bewigged Kristin Scott Thomas. The film re-teams Calamy with director Marc Fitoussi from Call My Agent!. And in the drama Annie’s Fire, Calamy plays a working-class mother who becomes involved in organising safe illegal abortions after she has one herself.
Virginie Efira
Belgian-born Virginie Efira stars in Other People’s Children, a film that honours the family role of stepmothers. It follows a 40-year-old woman (Efira) who is probably unable to have children and who becomes attached to the four-year-old daughter of her boyfriend (Roschdy Zem, also in The Innocent). She becomes painfully aware that the girl will never be her own. The film has been chosen for Sundance’s Spotlight section, which highlights strong entries from other festivals. Diners at a birthday celebration run for cover amid a hail of bullets in Paris Memories, set during the 2015 terror attacks on the French capital. At the dinner Efira locks eyes with Benoit Magimel and the film follows their reconnection at a survivors’ group as she struggles to move on with her life.
Lea Seydoux
Probably the most famous of French actors internationally – thanks to James Bond films Spectre and No Time to Die – Lea Seydoux says the woman she plays in One Fine Morning is the closest to herself of any of her on-screen characters. She plays a single mother who, while caring for her ailing father, falls for a married man played by Melvil Poupaud (also in Brother and Sister).
Marion Cotillard
Winner of the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, Marion Cotillard appears as another showbusiness star in her new film, Brother and Sister. She plays a famous stage actor who is estranged from her brother (Poupaud), a successful author who lives in the remote Pyrenees. They are forced to deal with each other following a tragic accident involving their parents.
Isabelle Adjani
The only actor to win five Cesars, and the first French actor to receive two Oscar nominations, Isabelle Adjani achieved huge fame in her youth, although she has fallen off the radar of late. In Masquerade, set on the French Riviera, she plays a fading film star who takes on a young lover (Pierre Niney), a beautiful, failed dancer and classic gigolo who seduces wealthy women to support his lavish lifestyle. When he meets and falls for an equally gorgeous younger woman (Marine Vacth), a schemer like himself, they hatch a plan. The outcome is not what you’d expect.
Juliette Binoche
La Binoche has only a supporting role in Winter Boy, but is impressive as a mother trying to console her 17-year-old son after the death of his father. This largely autobiographical film from writer-director Christophe Honore features Paul Kircher as the son. The real-life son of French actor Irene Jacob (Three Colours: Red) is a true discovery and won the San Sebastian festival’s best actor award.
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