Director Benoît Jacquot filmed, during the 2021 edition of the Avignon Festival, the actress and the actor, each in the learning of her text.
By Maroussia Dubreuil
Nowadays, famous actors are no longer so much mysterious, indecipherable and untouchable stars. They deliver their manias on the sofa of the American presenter Oprah Winfrey, share their breakfasts on social networks and support the big causes by evoking theirs. They are part of current affairs, and the cinema likes nothing as much as playing with their private life by hiring “nepo babies” (nepo for nepotism, son and daughters of, to which the New York Magazine has just devoted its “one” ) and amateurs identified by wild casting precisely because their daily lives resemble that of the characters. Number of directors, in the cinema as in the theater, devote an improvisation cult, favoring the words of their performers to those who are already written, and invoke the Stanislavski method, defined by Lee Strasberg, director of Actors Studio In the late 1960s, as follows: “Bring the character to oneself and not the other way around.”
A counter-current, the documentary by hearts, shot at the Avignon Festival in July 2021, returns to the powers of the text: Isabelle Huppert and Fabrice Luchini, two traveling companions by Benoît Jacquot, already gathered in no scandal, In 1999, the mission was to be fully at the service of the authors. For her, in the precision of “by heart”. For him, in his ability to make the sense of sentences perceptible. A common goal: to disappear behind the texts to deliver them in their original purity. It goes without saying that it can only be a failure … all the interest of the film lies in this permanent tension: how two actors archireconnassable, to the point of talking about the “films by Isabelle Huppert” and “Phrasé Luchini”, Can they be reduced to zero?
On the eve of the first of Cerisaie, of Tchekhov, Huppert comes up on a replica that ends up becoming his obsession. She methodically repeats the passage she failed to memorize, like a nun that whisper the same prayer to repel the drama … but the hole happens on stage. A monumental hole. Rarely has made a visible the resistance of an interpreter with words that are not hers. This is the famous paradox of Diderot’s actor. How to play composure when your sensitivity disobeys text?
reading work
The second part of the film moves a little further south of the Provencal city, in the courtyard of the Calvet museum, where Fabrice Luchini is preparing to give two exclusive representations of his only-in-scène around Nietzsche, whose He will read and comment on chosen texts. In 1998, Benoît Jacquot had already been interested in his way of working the passage from writing to the said, during the performances around La Fontaine, Céline and Flaubert.
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