"I wanted to make a road-movie in Brittany" explains director Manuel Poirier. "Some years ago I fell in love with the port of Guilvinec, its surroundings and its fishing boats. It's a place full of poetry but also reality. I promised myself that one day I'd come back to make a film. Finistère, with its authentically wild coastline, was the obvious choice of location, especially as I was shooting for the wide screen."
Western follows the fortunes of two accidental travelling companions, Paco and Nino, who meet up on the roads of Brittany. Paco (Sergi Lopez) is Spanish, a Latin lover, whose companion Nino (Sacha Bourdo), a Russian immigrant, has much less luck with women.
With this, his fourth feature film for cinema (excluding the TV episode Attention, Fragile for La Sept/ARTE), Poirier continues to explore an indivivdual path, distinct from the concerns of the majority of so-called French 'independent' films. Literally geographically apart; unlike many of his contemporaries Poirier's cinema is one resolutely commmitted to the French countryside and to the region of Normandy in particular. He moved there from Paris in 1990 where, after four years searching for a producer for his first feature project La Petite Amie d'Antonio (1992), the film started to take shape. The critical success of his first feature led to a meeting with the producer Maurice Bernart of Salomé Productions and the forging of a partnership that led to the director and producer working together on ... à la campagne (1994) starring Benoit Régent and Judith Henry onMarion (1996) and now on Western.
"I like choosing actors," admits Poirier "Firstly, I consider their personalities and then I envisage what can bring us together in a shared endeavour. The talent they show in the film is also a reflection of the relationships between us outside our working relationships." It's this sensibility that has led Poirier to work several times with Sergi Lopez, who plays Paco in Western.
"I knew that Paco was Sergi Lopez. I'd cast Sergi in La Petite Amie d'Antonio., but at that time I didn't know him, he'd never acted in a film. Since then he has played in all my features. Western sets a seal on our work and our friendship."
Poirier's approach to his work and its subject matter rests on this intimacy and a desire to be exposed to the life of a place and its people. Born forty years ago in Peru, Poirier came to cinema through a long and unsusual trajectory. "I started out doing loads of different jobs, I was a factory worker, a prison visitor and a cabinet maker. After all, the most important thing at the end of the day is one's relationship with others, and curiosity, the need to live things." His films are characterised by this initmate concentration on relationships and friendship as well as by their loose, episodic and gradual narrative development. A road-movie, with its detours and chance encounters seems the ideal format for a filmmaker with Poirier's preoccupations.
"The idea behind this film had been in my mind for some years, "the director explains, "it's a story of two young strangers, very diferent from each other, in their personalities but also in their relationships with women and love. Bringing out their differences was both meaningful and interesting." But the most telling statement that Poirier could make about the overlap of life and art that his filmmaking is dedicated to capturing - withthe utmost delicacy - comes in his words, "For me, life is still more important than the cinema." Chris Darke
Prod.co: Salomé SA - Diaphana
Prod: Maurice Bernart
Dir: Manuel Poirier
Scr: Manuel Poirier, Jean-François Goyet
Ph: Nara Kéo Kosal
Art Dir: Roland Mirbulle
Cos: Sophie Dwernecki
Ed: Yann Dedet
Cast: Sergi Lopez, Sache Bourdo, Elisabeth Vitali
Running time: 135 mins
Int sales: President Films
