Benoit Jacquot 

 France 
 

Isabelle had liked La Fille Seule (1989), a film that I'd made around an actress and her character and she wanted me to take her in that direction. 

The second element of the desire behind the film, Jacquot elaborates, was the timely intervention of the producer Fabienne Vonier. "It was Fabienne who gave us Mishima's L'Ecole de la chair, suggesting that the novel could be the point of departure for the film that Isabelle and I were looking to make." 

Jacquot admits that he encountered difficulties in adapting the specifics of the novel's Japanese setting and themes; "Above all, the novel's power was in its being an extraordinary document on the female landscape of Japan in the immediate post-war period. But I don't know how to transport this power to the here and now of France." The director abstracted certain key scenes and motifs from the novel and, with these in mind, handed over the task of writing the screenplay to veteran screenwriter Jacques Fieschi. 

"It's the first time that I completely left the screenwriting to someone else," he admits. Certain Oriental details were adapted to fit the French setting in which two characters, Dominique (Isabelle Huppert) and Quentin (Vincent Martinez) meet. "I chose a fairly stripped-down apartment for the character of Dominique. I placed some calligraphy here and there and shot a scene in a Japanese restaurant. Furthermore, it turned out that Vincent Martinez has something Asiatic about him. He sometimes looks like he's out of an Oshima film of the 50s, or a contemporary Taiwanese film," observes Jacquot. 

"In re-reading the novel, I discovered that, behind the female landscape enlarged to take in the nation, there was something else just as strong, which is at the root of Mishima's work: inversion, and not simply sexually, but the inversion of all order." It was the discovery of this abiding theme that enabled Jacquot to identify an approach to characterisation that would work for his adaptation. 

"What's powerful in Mishima's novel, and which could conceivably be very beautiful, is that the woman takes the place of the experienced male, and the young man occupies the position normally assigned to the young femme fatale. There are small signs of this fluctuation: Dominique has an androgynous first-name, short hair and only wears trousers. It's paramount that what happens to her is what happens to the man in so many other cinematic or literary fictions. With Isabelle's femmininity, Dominique could never be taken for an amazon. She's close in character to the wealthy 40-something man who completely swallows up all the youth, beauty and violence of a young girl. But here, the girl has become a boy. 

As a film about a sexual relationship in which, as Jacquot puts it, "Dominique is masculinised by her position and Quentin femminised by his," the director insist that his approach should be about modesty. "I wanted everything in the film to be communicated through a web of gestures, words and looks, a highly sexual and eroticised web and in close proximity to the camera." Jacquot sums up the ambience of the pair's relationship in the film thus, "I knew that between Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Martinez, their characters would be closer to boxing than embracing". Chris Darke