A
screen adaptation of Jacques Chardonne's 1936 novel "Les
Destinées Sentimentales" has long been a pet
project for director Olivier Assayas. He originally thought
of setting the film up with producer Bruno Pessery of Arena
Films after making his third feature, Paris S'Eveille,
in 1991, and much of Assayas' subsequent filmography seems
to have been the result of waiting for the right moment
to mount the big-budget period film.
But
such delays were clearly productive. Having won the 1991
Prix Jean Vigo for Paris S'Eveille, Assayas
went on to make four more films: Une Nouvelle Vie
(1993), L'Eau Froide (1994), Irma Vep
(1996) his first film to be widely distributed
outside France and Fin Aout, Debut Septembre
(1998).
A
screenwriter for Andre Techine, among others, and a member
of the editorial committee of Cahiers Du Cinema between
1980 and 1985, Assayas has also continued to pursue his
critic's interest in world cinema.
He
has published a book (in conjunction with Stig Borkman)
of interviews with Ingmar Bergman (in 1990) and a study
of American avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, as well
as making a number of film portraits of directors. These
include "HHH" (1998), a study of the Taiwanese
director Hou Hsaio-Hsien.
Set
during the first three decades of the last century, Les
Destinées Sentimentales tells the
story of Jean Barnery (Charles Berling), a former pastor
separated from his first wife Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert).
Jean marries a younger woman, Pauline (Emmanuelle Beart),
from a Limoges family of porcelain manufacturers, and Assayas'
film stays faithful to the novel's 30-year focus on their
marriage.
With
its historical scope and the attention to period detail
that such a reconstruction of an epoch requires, Les
Destinées Sentimentales seems an unlikely
project for Assayas, whose previous seven films have all
been resolutely contemporary in their subject matter and
style.
If
one of the key themes of Assayas' films could be described
as "the passage of time and its effects," as Cahiers Du Cinema
put it, then Assayas seems to have been careful in gathering
together a production crew to assist him in his own transition
from the improvisational, low-budget production contexts of
his previous films.
The
crew includes the first-assistant director Marie-Jeanne
Pascal and the production designer Katia Wyszkop, both of
whom worked on Maurice Pialat's films Sous Le Soleil
De Satan
and Van Gogh, the latter acknowledged by Assayas
as providing a model for his approach to Les Destinées
Sentimentales. "Olivier demands a high degree of
precision," Wyszkop told Cahiers. "He has a highly developed
sense of detail. For one scene with Jean Barnery we had
to devise a book by Andre Gide in an edition that could
no longer be found. When he saw the book on the table he
asked us to do it again the title wasn't right for
him."
Assayas
explains that the script, written with Jacques Fieschi (screenwriter
on Claude Sautet's Un Coeur En Hiver, 1992),
was a key element in the film's fidelity to Chardonne's
novel: "The screenplay follows the three-part structure
of the novel, in the same way that the shooting schedule
followed the chronology of the story, as much as was possible.
It's important for actors who have to play their characters
as they age to see the film evolving along with their own
physical appearances."
The
film was shot over three months with a budget of FF100 million
and, having completed Leos Carax's comeback feature Pola
X, producer Bruno Pessery admits that while it's taken
the
best
part of a decade for the project to get off the ground, this
has been "a very important shoot for Olivier and I: for him,
in that it's a historical drama that poses new challenges
for his direction; for me, because it's the first time I've
undertaken such a costly project."
Shooting
again with Assayas is cinematographer Eric Gautier, who
also worked with the director on Irma Vep,
as well as having recently completed another young French
auteur's uncharacteristic
sortie into costume drama Arnaud Desplechin's English-language
film Esther Kahn, also in competition.
Gautier
expresses the main challenges that the film set director and
cinematographer alike: "How does one realistically capture
not only a passing moment but also a period in which one didn't
live, where we should feel at home without feeling like we're
in a museum?"
To
this end, it appears that Assayas has been looking at other
films that have managed to pull off that difficult challenge,
among them Scorsese's The Age of Innocence,
Lynch's The Elephant Man and Bergman's Fanny
and Alexander.
Chris
Darke
