Two hander

Christophe Honoré and Louis Garrel avoid false notes in Love Songs.

“You haven’t answered the question,” director Christophe Honoré interjects when the star of his latest movie, Louis Garrel, goes off on a meandering path. “This is a depressing interview,” Garrel muses a few minutes later, as Honoré rattles on about the relationship between Eros and Thanatos in the film, an endearing musical called Love Songs, which the pair are jointly plugging in New York.

The relationship between director and actor can be fraught with more baggage than a Louis Vuitton ad campaign, but the banter between Garrel (The Dreamers, Regular Lovers) and Honoré is playfully affectionate. After three consecutive movies together, their rapport has led French critics to often compare them to François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud. But while Honoré, 37, certainly is open about his enduring love for Nouvelle Vague movies, his collaboration with Garrel, 24, feels closer to the one between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp: not so much a mentor molding a youthful actor into a screen alter ego, but an older brother helping a wilder pup broaden his range, even as said pup tries hard to look cool.

At the start of the film—which hopscotches from comedy to drama and back again, paced by Alex Beaupain’s melancholy pop songs—Garrel’s Ismaël and his girlfriend, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), are seen engaging in a happy-shaky ménage with Ismaël’s coworker Alice (Clotilde Hesme). “A man with two women is such a rancid heterosexual cliché that it’s really difficult to show it without looking crass,” Honoré says. “So we played around with the fact that sexually, Ismaël’s certainly not the most gifted of the three”—the director slyly eyes Garrel—“which is something you argued about.” The actor primly demurs: “Not at all! I actually had a whole theory about the movie: At the beginning the audience hates us and unconsciously wishes us dead, so when Ludivine does die, they feel guilty.”

Ah, right, that pesky detail about a crucial character dying barely half an hour into the film. “It was complicated, because of the three, she’s the best-known actor,” Honoré says. “There were people on the Web saying, ‘Poor Ludivine, we don’t see her enough.’ But one of the things the movie is about is the idea of someone not being stopped by death and exploring unchartered territories. The most obvious of them is Ismaël going out with another boy, though that’s not the real scandal: It’s that he’d see someone, anyone, so quickly after his girlfriend’s death. But just look at funerals—the ritual of death is connected to sex.” Garrel grumbles in disagreement, and Honoré smiles, adding, “Maybe that’s my Bataille side talking.”

The director is alluding to Georges Bataille, whose transgressive novel Ma Mère he turned into a grim, Houellebecqian film that marked his first collaboration with Garrel, back in 2004; the two then followed it up with the New Wave homage Dans Paris. While that pairing was received with great critical acclaim in France, Honoré didn’t write Ismaël for Garrel. “Originally I wanted Ismaël to be in his forties, and I also didn’t know if Louis could sing. But he told me that he was interested and he learned one of the songs. We auditioned him and he got the part. Then I realized none of the other actors we’d considered worked because I had unconsciously written the lines with Louis’s cadences in mind.”

The pair have just wrapped up their fourth shared venture, a made-for-TV, modern-dress adaptation of Madame de Lafayette’s 17th-century classic La Princesse de Clèves. Garrel, playing an Italian teacher, seems to graduate from the impetuous-young-man type he’s clearly mastered to someone representing authority. “But he sleeps with one of his students, so there’s still something a bit infantile about him,” the actor says. Honoré breaks in with an update: “You haven’t seen the edited version, though. I swear to you, that character feels very different from what he was when we were shooting.”

Honoré sounds positively gleeful: The miracle of film makes this most cinephilic of cineastes visibly happy. His love for the medium is evident in all his movies, which are full of visual allusions. For him, cinema is as much a part of life as breathing or eating, and needs to be taken equally seriously. At the beginning of Love Songs, Julie is berated by Ismaël for going to see a (real-life) flick called Pardonnez-moi. “I needed a bad movie and that was the bad movie showing at the time,” Honoré explains. “Ismaël’s reaction was even more violent—Julie called him a fascist—but I edited it out.” Garrel: “People don’t behave like that in real life anyway.” Honoré: “Yes they do! I’m really mad at my friends when they go see a shitty movie.”

Read additional outtakes from this interview.  

Click here to listen to 3 tracks from Love Songs.
 

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