No sex please, we're French

Time Out talks to Patrice Chéreau about latest feature, 'Gabrielle'.

Nov 17 2006

French filmmaker Patrice Chéreau first came to attention here ten years back, with his swirling historical epic and Cannes Jury Prize-winner with Isabelle Adjani and Daniel Auteuil, 'La Reine Margot'. That film offered plentiful evidence, amid its gore and restless bustle, of the one-time teenage prodigy's operatic sweep and sympathetic direction of actors. He learned it over a 40-year period experimenting, in France and elsewhere, in a staggering range of stage and performance arts, garnering notable successes with Wagner's 'Ring' and Ibsen (alongside, it must be noted, his fair share of slaying notices, such as our opera critic's scorching dismantling of his recent DVD of 'Cosi fan Tutti', as the youthful-looking 60-year-old director himself embarrassingly reminded me at the end of our recent Pall Mall interview).

Controversy has followed Chéreau. It followed him to London on his last trip here in 2000 for his first English-language movie, 'Intimacy', an adaptation of three Hanif Kureishi short stories, whose scenes of explicit, anonymous sex as performed by its lovers (Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox) in their seedy New Cross flat ran into problems with the BBFC. Kureishi's direct concern with the battleground between social relations and sexual desire spurred Chéreau into a fascinating change of tack. 'Intimacy' proved the first of what became a loose trilogy, later comprising 'Mon Frère' (a moving and tough account of how two brothers are brought together by one's impending mortality) and now, 'Gabrielle', an adaptation of an extraordinary novella written in 1897 by Joseph Conrad, which describes how a secure, bourgeois Londoner's world is blown apart when, one day, quite unexpectedly, his wife walks out on him, and just as surprisingly, comes straight back.

As 'Intimacy' was 'Gabrielle' with no talk, ''Gabrielle' is 'Intimacy' but with no sex!' sums up the director, with an amused flourish. 'Conrad's short story is different from the film,' he explains. 'In the short story, first of all, the wife [played by Isabelle Huppert] doesn't speak at all. She's silent and she's enigmatic. But suddenly,when she speaks, when she says something, it's always amazing. It's always puzzling for the man. Always disturbing. And that was beautiful. She says this line, which we kept in the film, 'If I had known that you loved me, I would never have come back.' Probably for this sentence – or to understand this sentence – I made the film.'

To this end, Chéreau and his co-scripter for the whole 'trilogy', Anne-Louise Trividic, had to make considerable changes. 'Of course, to go further into the psychology of this woman, she has to talk. If you want a good actress, she has to talk.

'Jean [Gabrielle's husband] says, 'Don’t talk! I will explain to you what happened!'' Chéreau laughs. 'A lot of people do that, mainly with couples. He has a monologue . So we needed to add her monologue.'

The director has not only changed the setting, from London to Paris, but also the period. Conrad's novella was set in the 1890s, Chéreau's adaptation is set immediately before World War I. 'I was interested in showing a beautiful old time. It is important to show that these people are wealthy. They are not victims. She's not a victim. She's a very arrogant woman and she's living a beautiful life, but it's empty and useless. As a director, I was interested in reconstructing the past. Even so, after 20 or 30 minutes of film, hopefully, we forget the time. And I know what some people say: people behaved because of the society, because of rules. I think the rules are still there. I think Jean's ignorance of his wife is still there. Not having sex any more is still there. So on one hand, it's a period film and on the other it's not. That's my hope.'

In concert with the jagged realism of 'Intimacy', Chéreau's regular cinematographer Eric Gaultier used a restless hand-held camera; here, following the husband's despairing gestures after reading Gabrielle's 'Dear Jean' letter, or circling these two incomprehending wagers of war, he applies something nearer to an Ophulsian classicism.

'I wanted a strong, heavy, unpleasant light, like a mausoleum, a tomb,' says Chéreau. 'Stylistically, everything started from the Conrad story. How to shoot the critical moment when he discovers and then reads the letter. That is the moment when every stylistic decision came together. The idea was to use black and white with sound and colour without sound. I tried many, many ways of showing this envelope, you know. We also had special lighting on the envelope – like Hitchcock with the glass of milk in 'Suspicion' – and we tried to use all the mirrors in the room, and a zoom on the letter. We tried many ways. Then we decided to use all of them.
To find a way to describe the shock the letter makes as well as Conrad does in prose.'

Another of the film's marvels is the slow disintegration of Jean. Pascal Greggory, in an extraordinary performance, expresses a seemingly mad but actually logical sequence of thoughts, declining the gradations of breakdown in a way that beautifully illustrates how the threatened human brain deals with the unacceptable. It's quite unsettling, and mysterious.

'I think there is mystery in every relationship,' offers Chéreau. 'Living with people has to do with mystery, with many, many things not totally explained, never totally known. It is a very fragile balance we have to strike. I think both these two characters are in the heart of this mystery. She tries throughout the whole film to understand what she did. To leave. But it's new for her. She didn't plan it. And she left the house forever. And she comes back. That means she will never do it again. It's over. She will stay. That's a mystery, too.'

'Gabrielle' opens on Friday.

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