After three years of silence, the director of “La Vie d’Adèle” was heckled at the Cinemed festival in Montpellier by feminists, to which he wanted to answer.
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“In the history of cinema, you have to see the number of feature films that have been demolished before being rehabilitated!, says, sighing Abdellatif Kechiche, while it is found after three years spent under radars. Since the screening, in 2019, at the Cannes festival, from Mektoub My Love. Intermezzo, the director (a rain of Caesars, a palm of gold) had disappeared. We make a film and then he has his destiny … and I believe Still to the fate of this work which escapes me. The more it escapes me, and the more love for her. “
Close -ups, loves at the end of the night, endless scenes in a nightclub, and an anthology cunnilingus of which a facetious journalist had taken care to time the length: thirteen minutes. Two performances at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, and then nothing. The main actress, Ophélie Bau, feeling betrayed, had left the room at the time during the session, confirming a crisis that would register Intermezzo in the pantheon of cursed films: liquidation of the director’s production company, musical rights Strong mortgage still today any fentenity of commercial exit…
Three years later, it was at the Cinemed festival, in Montpellier, not far from Sète where the film was shot, that Abdellatif Kechiche is announced for a Master Class, this Friday, October 28. He meets some journalists the day before, in a small committee. A net of voice, almost a whisper. Shaved skull, hollow cheeks, emaciated body. He emanates from this man who had been acted, a fragility and a pain that surprises: “Intermezzo, I think it was not seen. Too disturbed before his projection and not finished from a technical point of view , I should never have shown it. “He would like to explain:” I aspired to create a kind of collective hypnosis in the pleasure of watching, bodies, music, faces, movement, light of the beach . Me, in any case, these images put me in a very strange state. I hoped to communicate this to the spectators. “
We feel worried. Not sure, at 61, to want to speak. Tired, it seems, controversies and standards that mark out his career. After the fault of Voltaire (2000), the Esquive (2004) and the Graine and the Mulet (2007), which propel the kid from the popular districts of Nice to the rank of star filmmaker, Venus Noire (2010) marks a first hitch – trial with the producer and distributor MK2, and reputation of a not convenient filmmaker. Three years later, the consecration brought to him by the life of Adèle, with the Palme d’Or, was delighted the show by the scandal of the working conditions which his technicians denounce and that on his way of pushing his actresses (Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos) in their entrenchments.
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