So, to present the film. I'll try to be concise. My life (the director's: Marie-Claude Treilhou) brought me to experience a lot of very diverse situations, including at a time working as an usher in a movie theater, which is the movie theater where this film was shot. And I wasn't in that theater to observe anything, I was there to make a living. Suddenly when I was working in this theater I became conscious of the incredible situation which I was in, that had an extraordinary richness for revealing things.
There was the off screen voice, there was the little theater stage on which the usher where, because I was working with Ingrid Bourgoin who was also an usher and eventually played the role of Simon Barbes in the film. So Ingrid Bourgoin was already an extremely strong, natural character. And then there is the fact that we were located looking up from a low angle at the street, which was kind of like a natural screen. So outside we had this nocturnal reality and we were between the two - what was happening in the movie theaters and outdoors. And this incredible circulation, this traffic, this diversity - provided an extremely rich opportunity to talk about society. There was the representation of day, the representation of night. There was real reality, fake reality. There were metamorphoses. The very theatrical possibility of sudden shifts.
So I had, in front of me, this very theatrical rich situation that was also an opportunity to talk about a certain time period, the time period were we are suddenly tipping over into mass pornography. And to tell the truth, it's also a love film. A film about love if you will. It's certainly a film on love. In the background you have this wedding dress-store outside on the street, and inside the movie theater you have, if you will, the backstage of the marriage. And between the two you have these two kinds of witches who are trying to not fall into total despair, by playing out or acting out a fantastic comedy between themselves and with the customers of the movie theater. And that's really the only solution - to play or to act, and have always been that way. The whole film, in a sense, is an extension of that, this movement between romantic love and then sex with all its flaws, sadness and obscurities.
There was the off screen voice, there was the little theater stage on which the usher where, because I was working with Ingrid Bourgoin who was also an usher and eventually played the role of Simon Barbes in the film. So Ingrid Bourgoin was already an extremely strong, natural character. And then there is the fact that we were located looking up from a low angle at the street, which was kind of like a natural screen. So outside we had this nocturnal reality and we were between the two - what was happening in the movie theaters and outdoors. And this incredible circulation, this traffic, this diversity - provided an extremely rich opportunity to talk about society. There was the representation of day, the representation of night. There was real reality, fake reality. There were metamorphoses. The very theatrical possibility of sudden shifts.
So I had, in front of me, this very theatrical rich situation that was also an opportunity to talk about a certain time period, the time period were we are suddenly tipping over into mass pornography. And to tell the truth, it's also a love film. A film about love if you will. It's certainly a film on love. In the background you have this wedding dress-store outside on the street, and inside the movie theater you have, if you will, the backstage of the marriage. And between the two you have these two kinds of witches who are trying to not fall into total despair, by playing out or acting out a fantastic comedy between themselves and with the customers of the movie theater. And that's really the only solution - to play or to act, and have always been that way. The whole film, in a sense, is an extension of that, this movement between romantic love and then sex with all its flaws, sadness and obscurities.