ScreenWize

Philip Claudel’s debut feature film I’ve Loved You So Long had its Australian premiere at the Canberra International Film Festival last month and was ranked the second most popular film of the festival, no doubt thanks in part to the performance of Kristen Scott-Thomas as Juliette, its troubled central character. Now the movie is about to have its general release across Australia and Claudel himself is on a whirlwind tour of the country to help with its promotion.

Claudel is better known as a novelist and academic and is currently Professor of Literature at the University of Nancy. But he’s always had an interest in filmmaking. “I made short films with friends when I was a student 25 years ago” he says. “We did everything - acting, directing, editing - and it was a lot of fun. I wanted to write a feature film at the time, but I was too young and inexperienced and I decided it would be too difficult for me to write a good screenplay.”

This feeling of inexperience extended to his other work as well. “I started writing when I was very young - at the age of seven or eight,” says Claudel, “and for the next 25 years I felt my writing was always bad, and that I was too immature. Then one day, when I was about 34 or 35, I wrote a short text and when I read it the next day, I suddenly – and for the first time - had the impression that I was writing as a man, as someone with memories. When we write screenplays or novels we need to have some experience of love and pain and death.”

From the opening shot of the film, it’s clear that Juliette has had an experience that has knocked the life out of her. We learn that she’s been in prison for 15 years and is about to start a new life – firstly by moving in with her much younger sister Lea, played by Elsa Zylberstien, and her family. It’s a very cinematic opening to a film – unusual for a first time director from a writing background. But the change in medium didn’t trouble Claudel. “I like the challenge when you have to express feelings in a different artistic media. And I knew immediately that it was going to be impossible to tell this story in a novel. I wanted to work with silence. I wanted to express the interior drama of Juliette either without words or with very simple and basic language. In the opening of the film, I choose to shoot Kirsten with no dialogue, without make up, in strong light, with sad clothes and a grey face, and it was possible to disclose so much with that one shot.”

We never see the prison where Juliette spent the fifteen years before the story starts, but Scott-Thomas carries it with her like a shroud, frightening other characters in the story and audience members alike. It’s an effect that Claudel was looking for deliberately. “ I taught in a prison for 11 years and it was this experience that showed me how complex human nature is, and how difficult it is to communicate properly with people. I realised – and perhaps this was the most important discovery I have ever made – that people in prison cannot be judged as monster or animals: they are just humans like you or me. I wanted people to witness - with this movie – the reaction of others when they meet someone just out of prison - fear, apathy, being scared – and my hope is to change the way we think about people who have come out of jail.”

Another deliberate act of the director was to cast the society that Juliette finds herself in as highly multi-cultural. Lea has adopted Vietnamese children and her friends are migrants from all over the world. “It’s important that the film reflects society’” says Claudel, “that it’s a mirror of life. It’s rare we see this in French films: a girl from Vietnam, an Iraqi doctor, a Polish grandpa and an English mother.” But Claudel also has another effect operating with this choice: “I like the relationship between the macrocosm and microcosm, and - as a writer - it’s important to work with both dimensions. We are observing a small family but at the same time getting an important picture of world society.”

The story though belongs to Juliette, and Scott Thomas’ performance has been widely tipped as an Oscar contender in next year’s Academy Awards. It takes a long time – just about the whole film – to find out what happened to make Juliette the woman she is, but Claudel hopes that audiences will be more interested about who she is becoming. “For me the revelation at the very end of the film is less important than the re-birth of this character” he says. “ I tried to compose the story as suspense, with a secret, but it’s not a mystery movie, it’s a movie about a mystery.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon