Arnaud
Desplechin describes new film, an adaptation of a
story by the long-forgotten English writer Arthur
Symons, as aiming to create "purely spiritual suspense".
He is also looking to create a costume drama set in
19th-century London the first time Desplechin
has made a film in English which draws from
the cinema of both Alfred Hitchcock and François
Truffaut. "The collection of Symons' stories is called
"Spiritual Adventures" which exactly defines
what we wanted to do," Desplechin explains. "That
is, film a spiritual adventure like a thriller."
The
title character, Esther Kahn (played
by Summer Phoenix), is born to Jewish immigrant parents
(Laszlo Szabo and Frances Barber) who both work in
the rag trade and live in the East End of London.
Growing up, Esther discovers theatre and acting, and
the experiences she has onstage slowly transform her.
Desplechin
describes his heroine as being "slow and stupid, the
least lively of the family. She has no feelings for
anyone, Esther is like a stone. Yet she poses us a
question normally reserved for philosophers: Given
that I dream, can I be sure that the world exists?
And what if we are only imitating life? However much
Esther imitates life she sees that it isn't enough
to make a complete person of herself."
Desplechin first read Arthur Symons' novel more than
15 years ago. "When I first started adapting [it]
with my co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu," he
says, "one film in particular guided us, Truffaut's
L'Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970).
Although Esther doesn't live in the woods but in the
East End of London a little before the invention of
cinema. As with Truffaut's film, mine wants to tell
the story of a 'wild child' a 'little monkey',
as her mother calls her who becomes human not
by learning to speak but through the theatre".
Produced on a budget of £7 million, Esther
Kahn is an Anglo-French co-production between
Why Not Productions, Les Films Alain Sarde and British
company, Zephyr Films. Chris Curling of Zephyr met
Desplechin and Pascal Caucheteuex of Why Not at the
screening of My Son The Fanatic at the
Dinard Festival two years ago. Of Desplechin's way
of working with British material, Curling comments,
"He spent over a year here, with eight months for
casting and the same amount of time for vacation-hunting.
He went to English films and the theatre and really
immersed himself in London. Arnaud approached [the
film] in a way that an English director would be unlikely
to. For example, he's cast Akbar Kurtha, who we'd
worked with on My Son The Fanatic as
part of this Jewish immigrant family. He definitely
wanted the film to have a contemporary feel. It's
extremely unlike the normal kind of costume drama."
The film was entirely shot on location in London,
both in theatres and the East End.
"He was absolutely determined from the beginning that
he wanted to shoot the film on location," Curling
recalls. In
his first two features, La Sentinelle
(1991) and Comment Je Me Suis Dispute... Ma
Vie Sexuelle (1996), Desplechin demonstrated
his ability to take genres and twist them while working
with ensemble casts. In La Sentinelle,
he took a cold-war thriller and wove in medical-philosophical
questions; in Comment Je Me Suis Dispute...
the intimate emotional canvas of le jeune cinema français
was expanded out to an epic three hours. For Esther
Kahn, with its international cast, the family
remains the focus for an adaptation in which Desplechin
admits drawing upon Hitchcock. "When I was preparing
to shoot, the only films that could guide me were
Hitchcock's," he explains. "In the case of the theatre
lesson led by Nathan Queelen (Ian Holm) for example,
it was the scene of the lesson in nuclear physics
in Torn Curtain. The girl with two faces?
Think of Vertigo. The loveless couple?
Again, Hitchcock Marnie."
"The version we're seeing at Cannes is Arnaud's
cut," Curling elaborates. "There will be another
version, which will also be his cut, but 20 minutes
shorter. That won't be ready for another three or
four months. I'm not sure who we'll go with in terms
of a UK distributor but I'm absolutely sure that
we'll find one. People have been interested, we
just haven't wanted to do a deal yet."
Chris
Darke
