Denis Dercourt interview

The 42-year-old French director of 'The Page Turner' speaks to Trevor Johnston.

Nov  3 2006

It isn't an exaggeration to say there's no other filmmaker quite like Denis Dercourt, for the simple reason that he's also an accomplished classical musician, whose day job is teaching the viola at the Conservatoire Nationale in Strasbourg. This goes some way to explaining why his elegant new thriller 'The Page Turner' gets inside the skin of these emotionally fragile musical athletes more persuasively than anything since Haneke's 'The Piano Teacher'.

Dercourt's subtle way with psychological suspense makes this a very different proposition however, as personal assistant Déborah François calmly goes about destroying the life of neurotic piano virtuoso Catherine Frot, the latter blithely unaware that she'd once caused her new page-turner to flunk out in a key audition during her childhood, effectively dashing her hopes of winning a musical scholarship. For one of these women, it’s a barely remembered blip, for the other the source of long-simmering revenge.

'I sometimes feel like an entomologist studying these very special insects,' reckons Dercourt of the milieu he knows so well, 'but I don't really think the subject of this film is music. There are, however, a lot of metaphors in the classical music world that you can apply elsewhere. In every job, for instance, we have struggle, passion, disappointment, but in this particular enclave, it's heightened because we begin so young. And the whole idea of suffering injustice in childhood is so universal, everyone can understand the desire for revenge. Thankfully, we don't all act on it, otherwise humanity would descend to the bestial, so even though Déborah's character is perhaps carrying this out on our behalf, we still understand that there's some frightening moral absence in her.'

Sold all over the world after its debut at Cannes this year, and already a sleeper hit across France, 'The Page Turner' has put Dercourt firmly on the celluloid map, though he shot his first feature 'The Music Freelancers' (which also had a brief London run) as far back as 1999. Having dabbled in Super 8 since childhood, before graduating to shorts and forming a production company – Les Films à un Dollar – with his brother Tom, he's sustained a remarkable twin-track career ever since. 'In France, we have a lot of holidays, especially if you're a teacher!' jokes the 42-year-old Parisian. 'Working in film can be very stressful, so it's great to have this oasis of calm to step back into. I definitely want to continue working this way.'

Not surprisingly, he's swift to point out the parallels between his two fields of endeavour, especially when it comes to making a film like 'The Page Turner', which takes elements of the thriller genre and startlingly weaves them into the minutely observed world of the chamber musician, with its fraught rehearsals and the tension of mastering Schubert and Shostakovich. 'It's a first time for me to make a film like this, and in a way it was like writing a fugue, something very codified. There are structures you have to obey, certain requirements for violence, fear, laughter – but not too much laughter! Of course, Hitchcock the great master realised that the best way to get hold of the audience was humour. It's like a magic formula: tension, laughter, increased tension. It works wonderfully well on screen when you bring it off, and of course it's a very musical structure too. After all, tension and release is the basic organising principle of Western musical expression.'

Although many critics have surmised the shadow of Chabrol on the film's social background and class tensions, Dercourt himself claims Minimalist music and painting as more of an influence on the subtle gradation of its controlled emotions, not to mention the aesthetic impact of a cultural-exchange spent in an exquisite villa among the temples of Kyoto. 'The thing about Japan,' he reflects of his six-month stay, 'is that everything you see, whether it's landscape or architecture, is somehow framed for viewing. There's a sense of constraint in the culture, which somehow also feeds into a lot of stories based on revenge. I'd be watching Noh plays, understanding very little, and with all the Japanese people around me dozing off, but I did take from it the idea of 'ma', the pause which creates tension in everything around it.

'That goes for the cinema as well, where stillness can intensify anticipation if you've already laid the groundwork for it. We know from the opening scene in 'The Page Turner' that there's something potentially dangerous about the little girl who grows up into the Déborah François character. So the actress can be in the middle of the frame, apparently doing nothing, yet it's scary. As a performer, she's emptied herself, so we the audience can project our emotions into that space. It's that unique moment of identification.'

'The Page Turner' opens today.

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