Claude Miller  

France 
 

Claude Miller's 10th feature film since his 1971 debut Camille ou la comedie catastrophique, La classe de la neige is adapted from the novel by co-screenwriter Emmanuel Carrere, which won the 1995 Prix Fermin. Carrere, a former film critic and regular screenwriter, had sent Miller a copy of the novel which enthused the director sufficiently to ask Carrere to adapt it for a film. 

With La Classe De la Neige, Miller returns to the ambiguous universe of childhood that characterises others of his films: the world of the holiday camp in La meilleure facon de marcher (1975) and the travails of adolescence in L'Effrontee (1985) and La petite voleuse (1988). The latter of these films was an adaptation of an original screenplay by Francois Truffaut, perhaps the greatest of French cinema's poets-of-childhood, and with whom Miller was a close friend and confidant. "I didn't have a hard childhood like Francois," admits Miller, "but let's say that childhood, the end of childhood, represents the most tormented, feverish and passionate period of my life. The memory I have of it is one of anguish, fear and complexes." 

The character of Nicolas, whom Miller describes as suffering from mythomania, recalls for the director the phrase spoken by Michel Simon in Marcel Carne's 1937 classic Drole de drame – keep thinking awful things and they end up happening. "At one point Nicolas asks, is it true that when you think very hard about something it happens?" reveals Miller. "He's evidently thinking about the death of his father. I'm very keen on this kind of situation, which is very cinematic. It's our entire life. One thinks very hard about something and, in making films, one makes them exist." 

Miller found himself struggling to find a grammar for the time-scheme of the film and to work out how to distinguish the present from the imagined, the filmic reality from Nicolas' feverish imaginings. "We decided first to use black and white for a past reality and hyper-saturated colours for the hallucination scenes. I shot and even edited certain sequences using this method but then I changed my mind. I found it too heavy, too sophisticated. I came to the conclusion that black and white served no purpose. If spectators were left a little adrift and if the transitions into dream and hallucination were not entirely clear, that's not necessarily a bad thing." 

Emmanuel Carrere describes himself as being "swept up" by Miller's adaptation of his novel. "But I don't completely trust my judgement, I feel a little too involved. I hope the film provokes the emotion that I felt in seeing it." The character of Nicolas, who might be dubbed Le Petit Nevrose, is on the cusp of knowledge, waking to discover that reality is more terrifying than he imagined, but, as Miller explains, "he's not only troubled by what he imagines are his father's problems, but by the awakening of his own sensuality. As for his father, I feel compassion for the man, he's an unhappy individual, destroyed and suicidal." Some things, it seems, are in the blood.  Chris Darke