Interview: Agnès Jaoui & Jean-Pierre Bacri

‘I think in any relationship – whenever you have two people – there is power,’ says Agnès Jaoui.

Nov  2 2004

‘I think in any relationship – whenever you have two people – there is power,’ says Agnès Jaoui. ‘And one person is going to take it, more or less. It’s a universal subject: the power relationship, strength and its use.’

‘I bet that in your job, in the place that you work – I imagine you are six or seven persons? – you can see every day that the movie is pertinent,’ her partner Jean-Pierre Bacri adds. ‘I think someone in your company is a tycoon. At least one!’

Bacri plays the brusque, boorish autocrat at the bull’s-eye of Jaoui’s latest pin-point comedy of manners, ‘Look at Me’ (‘Comme une Image’, or ‘like a picture’ – the alternative titles, like the film, juggle notions of passivity and objectification, attention-seeking and self-assertion). A fêted writer, he holds court over a small salon of friends, suckers and sycophants, as well as his overweight singer daughter Lolita (Marilou Berry), who’s still looking for approval from the one man who won’t give it. Jaoui’s previous film, ‘Le Goût des Autres’ (‘The Taste of Others’), was a similarly intimate skewing of the prejudices and presumptions of Parisian theatre folk, again co-written and performed with Bacri (Alain Resnais’ ‘On Connaît la Chanson’ and Cédric Klapisch’s ‘Un Air de Famille’ also come with the pair’s thumbprints on script and screen); but for all the films’ ready intimacy with French high-cultural circles, the pair insist these milieus are red herrings.

‘The strange thing is that this is the fourth country I’ve been to with the movie, and I keep hearing that people like it as a critique of the arrogance of French intellectual culture,’ says Jaoui. ‘I understand why they think that, but it was not our point. We deal with ordinary people, archetypes even. But we’re unable to invent characters – we need to know them in real life, and we were a little too lazy to research.

‘Also,’ she adds, ‘it was important for us that the tyrant was famous. Because celebrity is now a kind of power, and it’s an area where success can be quick. It was another theme, how success can change people.’

Of course, anatomising one’s own life without blinkers can be the hardest task; but so deftly does the film expose its social dynamics that I’m reminded of Edith Wharton, who similarly stood both of and apart from her society.

‘Oh, I love her,’ Jaoui coos. ‘One of our main themes is the search for happiness, or to be more precise, is it possible to change? And what tactics do we use? Most of us are born in a certain milieu, receive a certain education, and repeat what our parents did. Or you do the opposite, but it’s the same, finally. We are so docile and so determined by our environment and education, and often people are not even aware of it; they think their tastes are self-determined. It’s our big passion to question that and observe the real personality underneath it all. Can you manage to be a little bit more free, more yourself?’

Given that in France the pair have met the same kind of success that corrupts several of their characters, how have they dealt with it themselves?

Bacri shifts in his seat and snorts: ‘We are perfect.’ ‘The only thing I can say,’ Jaoui offers, ‘is that some people, when they meet success, buy a new apartment and car, and change wife and friends too, as in the movie. I had the opposite instinct. I had to tell my friends: “I need you; if I go into this beautiful hotel without you, I won’t be happy.” It’s difficult because, okay, you pay once, twice, and your friend thinks: Stop paying for me; but you want to share with them. And sometimes people are very rude with your friends. So one solution is just to see rich and famous people, but it’s really not my solution. I have friends from the age of seven and I want to keep them, and anyway we need to be in real life to describe it. But any time you change you need adjustment to deal with it. This isn’t normal, but it’s not so hard.’

‘Look at Me’ opens on Friday November 5.

A full review of 'Look at Me' is available online and in Time Out London November 3-10 2004. Issue No. 1785.

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