Riviera

Paru le 25-04-2024 La Lettre AFC n°150 Autres formats

The film tells the story of Stella, aged 17, a pretty blonde who lives with her mother Antoinette, in a small apartment on the French Riviera. Stella is a dancer in night-clubs and Antoinette works as a chambermaid in a luxury hotel. One works during the day and the other at night but they are always in touch. They live alongside a world of riches and garish luxury, without ever touching it.
Then Romanski comes along. He is an estate agent on a job on the French Riviera. He meets the mother in his hotel and lusts after the daughter in the club where he whiles away the time. And then the most unlikely thing happens : a meeting between a girl who is too beautiful and a man who is too lonely, perhaps the beginning of a love story.

When we were researching locations in Nice, Anne and I decided that the main character in the film was perhaps the Riviera itself. But we didn’t want to make a tourist commercial. Places such as the Promenade des Anglais have been filmed a thousand times. We elected to shoot the whole film using a long focal distance and to show only fragments of the décor. The French Riviera is everywhere, in the shape of its colours, the blue of the sea, the bright daylight or a host of sparkling lights at night. The landscape is a strong element but it becomes very abstract.
The film was shot entirely using a shoulder-held camera so that we were ever-ready to react to the actors’ movements. The film also has many close-ups, it’s a film on skin, the actresses’ skins... because Anne and I agreed that actresses’ skins are very rarely seen at the cinema and they are becoming more and more smooth (This is what made us choose 35 mm film rather than HD, for example).

We began shooting without having any idea of break-down and we thought that once everything was set up with the actors and thanks to the shouldered cameras, we would find the movements and the frames that would allow us to achieve the same wavelength as the actors.
This is an exciting way to work but quite risky, because the lighting has to be set up very quickly, using the same improvisation and trial-and-error system.
The film took shape quite naturally and decisions were made once they became obvious, just as we started filming.

This is the second time I have worked with Anne and each time, formal research was the focus of our work, which is very exciting for a director of photography.
The film was shot using a Moviecam fitted with a Cooke series S4. I used Kodak 5274 film which I really find very good, even if other films try to replace it, along with 5218.
Pierre Weité brilliantly focussed the film and Christophe Bousquet graded it for GTC using perfectly traditional techniques, far from digital agitation.