Interview: Cédric Kahn

'The French system is getting tougher,' Cédric Kahn says of his country’s filmmaking scene during an interview with Time Out in Paris.

Sep 21 2004

‘The French system is getting tougher,’ Cédric Kahn says of his country’s filmmaking scene during an interview with Time Out in Paris. ‘It’s becoming Americanised in a way: over the last five or six years, people have taken much more heed of box-office takings; investors are asking for scripts to be re-written; we’re getting away from a system where the auteur was king. That’s good in a way, but it’s done a lot of damage as well.’

At 38, Kahn is no revanchist stick-in-the-mud; in his own considered way – more grown-up than Mathieu Kassovitz or Jan Kounen, more grounded than Olivier Assayas – he’s keen to help drag French cinema out of its talky torpor. He catalogues his peers’ subject-matter: ‘Depression, breakdowns, people with no desires in life. Our protection has meant a lack of combativeness – that energy that exists in any form of art or expression when things are not easy.’ But American cinema is best made by the Americans; and the more the French system kowtows to commerce, the more its filmmakers will have to fight: there’s nothing freeing about capitalism, he cautions.

Kahn’s own films are all about kicking out; tales of male de-socialisation and delinquency, they’re characterised by protagonists on edge or off-kilter, pushing at the limits or chomping at the bit, usually in the reflection of their own personal Other. In ‘L’Ennui’ it’s Sophie Guillemin’s impassive, impenetrable plaything who gets under Charles Berling’s skin; in Roberto Succo it’s the forces of civil society and sanity that the careening serial-killer Succo claims would make a political prisoner of him. His new film, Red Lights, does a reclamation job on a thriller Georges Simenon wrote during his American sojourn half a century ago: it’s a spare and clammy study of a mismatched couple who get stuck on the road, and fester. She (Carole Bouquet) is aloof; he (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is insecure, and takes to the bottle for solace; a couple of wrong turns later and the fissure in their relationship has rent into a deathly void.

In his novel, Simenon drove his couple up Route One from New York to Maine. Kahn casts them into the listless creep of traffic decamping south from Paris for August: the film thus recaps great movie booze-crawls (The Lost Weekend), marital freeze-outs (Le Mépris) and hell-bound road odysseys (Detour, Weekend). But like Harry, He’s Here to Help, it also suggests French filmmakers’ ongoing appreciation of the Hitchcockian thriller. Opening shots of architectural geometry echo Saul Bass’s credits for North by Northwest, and there’s a sense of the same chastening tribulation that befalls Cary Grant’s plucked duck in that film; Kahn even makes Debussy sound like Bernard Herrmann on the soundtrack.

‘I’d wanted to make a suspense film for a long time, and I wanted it to be classical – a genre film, which felt a release after the frustration of “Roberto Succo”,’ he says. ‘There I’d tried to be as objective as possible. Here I could establish a relationship with the main character; and the story was right to use stars, with whom movie-goers identify more easily. The characters are close to the actors’ own images. Bouquet’s cold, domineering, very beautiful; her challenge was to break through the looking-glass and show her inner fragility. Darroussin’s an actor who’s typically French: people think they know him. But he’s known for lighter comedies, and it was a challenge to play this more dense and dramatic role. Each breaks down their appearance, and this is where it’s Simenon rather than Hitchcock, because of this duality in the characters. Each has good and evil inside, and there’s an expiation of the evil in the individual.’

There’s also a lot of mad driving; this makes three films in a row. ‘What I find interesting,’ he considers, ‘is when emotion is expressed through behaviour – whereas generally in French films feeling is expressed verbally. And driving is an attitude. In L’Ennui and Red Lights we’re watching ordinary people discovering their limits, particularly in relation to their fear of death. In the case of Roberto Succo it’s the other way around: madness is his normal mode. And, let’s not forget: he’s Italian.’

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