Paris (AFP)
In his youth, Arnaud Desplechin rejected theater as an art for bourgeois and intellectuals. Today, the French director says he is "amazed" to find himself a director for the second time.
Mount an American cult play, "Angels of America" by Tony Kushner, in the temple of the French theater, the Comédie-Française: this is the challenge that the director will face from January 18 (if the strike at "home" de Molière "allows it).
"What I like is to recognize that Kushner who was part of the theater + fringe + (experimental) has now become a classic," said Arnaud Desplechin in an interview with AFP. "It's my Shakespeare of mine".
At 59, he is with Christophe Honoré one of the two flagship directors who are taking to the stage this year (Honoré will go up in April "Le Côté de Guermantes" by Proust, also to the Frenchman).
"No, I haven't always liked the theater", affirms the filmmaker who made his first highly praised theatrical foray in 2015 with "Father" by Strindberg, still at the Comédie-Française.
"I was very afraid of it, I liked only the films, the theater seemed to me too serious, too bourgeois, too cultivated".
Then one day, he had a "dazzle": the "Hamlet" by Patrice Chéreau (Avignon 1988), one of the first to juggle as much between stage and big screen. Followed by plays by other giants like Peter Brook.
- In the cinema, "I am the king" -
"I learned cinema by going to the theater (...) this is where I learned to direct actors", explains the director, saying to himself "amazed by this" detour from the theater "today" at heart "of his life.
Far from the image of the all-powerful director on set, he presents himself as a "guest" at the Comédie-Française.
"On a film, I am the king. What is magnificent in French, is that the director is not the king, it is the actors and the actresses. I learn from them", assures the director of "Roubaix, une lumière".
"Angels in America" (1991), which recounts the AIDS years and homosexuality under the Reagan years, is a text which fascinated the director with his cinematographic writing and construction.
"The scenes are very brief, there is a competition between theater and cinema", explains the César for best director in 2016 for "Three memories of my youth".
A competition that initially destabilized the actors of the French, more versed in large format classics. "When you start a scene from Hugo, you have a dozen verses before you start feeling, there it is not possible, you have to be in feeling immediately.
It required from them "enormous vitality".
- "Praise of singularities" -
The play, which is normally six hours old, has been reduced to less than three hours - a condition of the Comédie-Française - with many cuts in monologues and references to American history.
Although it is steeped in references having a resonance with the news, Desplechin confides to have given more "attention to romantic relationships than to political matters", even if the election of Trump had motivated him.
"Trump, whom I learned that Roy Cohn (famous McCarthy lawyer and one of the characters in the play, editor's note) was the first lawyer," said Desplechin, calling him "an extraordinary villain" like the Richard III of Shakespeare.
"From Chernobyl to Fukushima, from Gorbachev to Putin, from Reagan to Trump ... when History tenses up, what do we do? From the theater".
"The play was visionary in the sense that it praises singularities, (...) anyone can recognize themselves in the loves of Louis Ironson, in the grief of Prior Walter, in the aspiration for freedom by Joe Pitt ".
"Although (Kushner) presents himself as Jewish, homosexual, democrat", Desplechin affirms that the play is not militant however.
The cantor of romantic relationships in the cinema, yet engaged in his civic life especially for the cause of the homeless, is said to be very defiant with regard to texts with messages. "Because they age badly".
© 2020 AFP