The idea of “doing” is already present in the title and runs throughout the first half of the film (“What are you doing?”; “I don’t know what to do, what can I do?”), before returning as a silent question in the second half. What is the origin of your film? What observation or concern gave rise to it?
The film was born from a desire for a shot-reverse shot dynamic. Was it also born out of a worry? Or sustained by one? Probably. The question “What is to be done?”, once asked by a revolutionary intent on building a political movement, now seems to have been overtaken by a widespread sense of powerlessness: is it still possible, or will it still be possible tomorrow, to do anything at all? To breathe, to feel, to dream, to criticise, to trust language, even to argue, and to invent together?…The film presents itself instead as a variation of the verb “do”, as a small arc or bridge stretched over the void, connecting a conversation that begins almost casually between two young people, one of whom has his eyes closed (-“What are you doing?” , -“I’m seeing”) and a whispered dialogue in the dark that affirms the existence of a utopia of disagreement. Along the way, there is also the question silently addressed to the child who is running late, a question addressed by a gaze, and that opens up the possibility of play.
Tu fais quoi? is divided into two parts, connected by a couple (played by Juliette Penblanc and Hugues Breton, who already appeared in your previous films). Each part is also structured around a pair of characters. Why did this dual structure interest you?
You’re right, the couple creates the link, and the number 2 provides the structure. It structures precisely because it also creates a cut, I think…The inscription of the number 2 distinguishes the two parts while at the same time articulating them, allowing them to resonate with one another…At least, that’s what I hope…But in my films, the number 2 (a couple or a duo) is never simply a two. It is neither fixed nor closed, it is constantly shaped by absence, loss or distance, and by multiplicity…That is even more true here, because the two young people are not alone - the cat, behind a window, silently participates in their dialogue - and when the couple reappear in the second half (their third appearance in the film), they are in fact a trio: the child, the granddaughter, is there too…
In the first half, several shots evoke an elsewhere imagined by the characters when they close their eyes. Could you tell us more about these images, where they come from, and how you wanted to use them?
Working with heterogeneous materials, bringing together and rubbing against one another different registers, temporalities, and landscapes, is very important to me. Given the threats weighing on the very idea of the present and the future, it also mattered to me that it should be these young people who carry this connection to History therefore including, of course, the history of cinema, that they should be the ones inviting figures from the past, playing with them, and shifting them. The idea of using these shots, the Paraná River in Rosario, the demonstration in Buenos Aires and Tito’s boat in Rijeka, all images I had filmed without knowing where or when they would eventually find their place, as invitations as a poet in 2011 and in 2018, came to me at the same time as the idea for the opening dialogue, which I immediately wrote before proposing it to Fethi Bekhechi and Tiziano Dorvault. In 2023, just before Argentina, like almost all of Latin America, swung towards the far right, there were many demonstrations in France against the pension reform, and Che’s image appeared on banners everywhere… Most of the film was shot in an apartment in central Marseille and by returning to the landscapes of my previous films in the Haute-Ubaye and the Camargue, but it is also made up of these images from my personal archives (very modest archives, incidentally, since I very rarely film unless I am already immersed in a project, already caught up in the movement of a film).
Your film plays on various forms of dialogue in cinema: dialogues, intertitles, telepathy conveyed through subtitles… Could you comment on these variations in the transmission of speech and thought?
I am especially fond of this idea, that different languages can coexist, that there are countless ways of giving form to, or welcoming, a dialogue, a voice, a thought, and that each film invents its own. The presence of two poems in Tu fais quoi? (dialogue poems) may have given this game another dimension…And because this is both a film and a poem, thinking, doing, addressing someone and transmitting something are connected.
Interviewed by Nathan Letoré
