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MillimeterFade to Black:
Arnaud Desplechin, Director
Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
To see one of Arnaud Desplechin's films is to experience life at the tipping point, yet know you are in safe hands. His latest, Kings and Queen, is an epic of Shakespearean proportions about a contemporary woman who has, as she says, “loved four men and killed two.” Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) struggles to take care of her son as her father is dying, while her former boyfriend Ismaël, played by the chaplinesque Mathieu Almaric, finds himself committed to a mental institution by an unknown associate. Their stories are told separately, and neither of the characters are who they seem by the end of the film.
“That was the tricky point: to make only one film, and to tell two very different kinds of stories,” says Desplechin. “Moving back and forth between the two of them, I hoped for a film that was in turn a burlesque farce in the manner of Mel Brooks or Harold Lloyd and a Hitchcockian melodrama … I wanted [it] to constantly skip from one register to the other.”
Desplechin is an avowed “cinema lover” with a firm foundation in the classics. But as steeped as he is in the past, he is encouraged by the ability of modern audiences to keep up with new techniques of storytelling. “When you look at popular arts, like the new TV shows — I'm thinking about 24 — you're able to go really faster in the storytelling, jumping from one gap to the other,” he says. “And all of Kings & Queen has been built about such a bet: ‘Will they follow us if we jump straight from tears to laughter, from pure melodrama to screwball comedy?’”
Watching Desplechin's scenes unfold is like being in an emotional confrontation with one's lover. The camera heightens the emotions of the characters, pulling the audience in. “It's so technical,” says Desplechin. “For me and [DP] Eric [Gautier], to look at a scene, what it means, to find where lies its truth. Will it be sharper, wiser, truer with wide shots or in a close shot? This movement of the camera, is it meaningful or vain? And for the actors to paint this precise color of that emotion, without any cliché, and not to rush in the feeling. It's so technical, but on the both sides of the camera we can feel when we did our job — when everything is dancing together and we reached a total empathy for all the characters.”
Gautier and Desplechin did help the audience a little with lighting choices. “All the scenes around Ismaël are enlightened with a very ‘novelistic’ kind of light — gorgeous, warm, enchanted — like the very real psychiatric hospital we shot [in]. … All the scenes around Nora seem enlightened by Emmanuelle's face itself — as if her face was the main light, surrounded by darkness.”
An interesting problem presented itself in the scene in which Nora recalls the suicide of her first husband. Desplechin found a small apartment where they were shooting in Grenoble, but he feared the scene would be too realistic, and the violence would obscure the scene's meaning. Three days before they were to shoot, Desplechin asked his production designer for a large, dark space, and the crucial props were brought over from location.
“Eric started to build the light,” says Desplechin, “and we started to set the scene very slowly, as if it was a laboratory where the two actors and I were trying to understand what did fuck up in that young couple. … Two days later, we filmed that scene again, in that small room. Eric used the same kind of lights. At the end of this process, with Laurence [Briaud], the editor, we used pieces of the two shooting days. One shot was filmed in this huge dark space, and its reverse in the small location. And you can't notice what has been shot here or there. Then, we had all the dimensions of this disaster.”
There is a scene near the end of the film in which Nora's father, who has just died, reads a cruel goodbye letter he wrote to his daughter. His image is degraded, as if calling from the dead. “To shoot the father's letter scene,” Desplechin says, “we just shut the shutter, to let the least light we could — as if the dead father had to fight to grip some light for his last curse. … We closed the shutter to 85 percent, then the image was dark, and we printed it to correct the darkness of it. It created this strange flapping — as an old silent movie; as a fragile image, fighting against the darkness, to reach us for a last time before it disappears.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.