In an interview with the “world”, the Chilean filmmaker, whose film is available on Netflix from November 16, explains the parallel he created between the mechanics of belief at work in the cinema and in Religion.
words collected by Thomas Sotinel
In 2013, the success of Gloria, first at the Berlin Festival, then in Chilean, French or American rooms, propelled Sebastian Lelio at the forefront of young Chilean filmmakers, in the company of Pablo Larrain. The author of this invigorating portrait of woman, his fourth feature film, chained on a fantastic woman (2017), who depicted a violent Chilean society, worked by the consequences of the dictatorship, through the gaze of a trans woman , to then venture far from home with disobedience (2017) and Gloria Bell (2018), American remake of Gloria built around his star, Julianne Moore.
Presented at the Toronto Festival in September, The Wonder (“La Merveille”, or “The wonder”, in English) was shot in Ireland and once again offers a great role to a great actress, Florence Pugh . She embodies an English nurse dispatched to a small Irish village to study the case of a teenager who claims to have stopped eating and only subsist by divine grace.
why have made a film whose Central subject is belief?
This project was the perfect opportunity to explore the role of fiction and stories in our lives, as well as to find a way of introducing the film itself into this question, as a fictional machine, Who triggers a kind of belief among spectators …
What differentiates an artist, who asks that we believe in his history, from a religious or political leader?
In The Wonder, I try to ensure that the spectator is active. I invite him to believe in this story, while exposing it to the mechanisms of the narration [the story proper, located in 1862, is framed by sequences which exhibit the reconstituted sets]. You will therefore see characters trapped in stories, and others who invent new stories, new ways to read reality. But you have been warned: I intend to three, and I ask you to suspend your disbelief.
This requirement comes from a filmmaker who turns far from home and who takes up a subject that is foreign to him…
It is important for me to find the path that will authorize me to tell a story. Which has to do with the way history resonates in me, first. But, then, I must explain myself to myself who I am, I, Chilean filmmaker, to arrive the right to go to Ireland and to tell a dramatic moment of Irish history, in the aftermath of the Great famine. In addition, what happens to this young girl is overwhelming, we cannot be lightness on this subject. But I grew up in southern Chile, under a very patriarchal dictatorship, in a very Catholic country [Sebastian Lelio was born in 1974, the year which followed the coup d’etat which overthrew Salvador Allende]. I told myself that I did not know much about the cultural specificities of Ireland in 1862, but that what was behind the dynamics of the history of The Wonder was the same state of mind.
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