In the movie, it is said while quoting Jean Narboni that “[Godard] only dealt with two subjects, and only two: love and war”. How did this inspire the film? Can you tell us more about how it came about?
This movie was made in successive layers.
First of all, there are the fragments I discover by chance, immediately seeing how I could make a movie from them – without knowing what kind of movie it would be. For about ten days, every morning, I collected the images that caught my interest from the previous night, the ones I was interested in, the ones that can make a shot (live camera, but keeping the previous twelve hours). Then I leave these images while thinking loosely about the film I could make.
At first, I imagine more of a documentary form, which I quickly abandon because it is too documentary. Then I think about my unused sound rushes from Je suis une héroïne périphérique. I recorded myself alone saying these dialogues so I can start editing, while waiting to find an actor. Then there’s the reading of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, which reminds me of present-day Russia and the ongoing war. Godard dies. In Libération, I find the Goya etching with the touch of blue and yellow paint added by Godard. And since I couldn’t avoid talking about his death, I chose this beautiful text by Jean Narboni, which rightly speaks of love and war: the themes of this film (even if the war in my film remains distant, almost abstract).
In Je suis une héroïne périphérique (FID 2021), you constructed a narrative somewhere between autobiography, autofiction and self-fantasizing. Using unused sound rushes from that film, can we therefore consider La nuit d’à côté a sequel or extension of that film? Did you feel that that something was left unfinished?
While rereading the dialogues from Je suis une héroïne périphérique to choose which part to pick, it still seemed fresh to me (linked to the love story narrated in Je suis une héroïne périphérique), but cutting through the scenes and replaying them (and especially having them replayed by an actor absolutely different from the man in Je suis une héroïne périphérique) allowed me to detach myself from the feeling that was there (a bit like photocopying a photocopy of a photocopy, not much of the original image can be recognized in the end).
Je suis une héroïne périphérique was a piecemeal film, so in a way it is still unfinished, at least in terms of what has not been said, what has not been fully disclosed. Here, I address the question of jealousy and betrayal a little more head-on.
The man and woman talking in the film remain almost anonymous, cut off from any context. Can you explain this decision?
Nabokov once wrote: “Memories either melt away or take on a deadly shine, so that instead of marvellous apparitions, we are left with an endless range of postcards ». Indeed, there is a kind of anonymous platitude to their dialogues, as though they were re-enacting a scene. Are they not completely involved in this relationship? Is it the woman who recalls these dialogues, as in Nabokov’s quote? Hence perhaps this lack of context – as if we struggle to put everything back in place when we try to relive something mentally. And let us not forget the hypothesis of the couple cast out of Paradise… lost in limbo.
During the course of their conversation, the story of Genesis in the tradition of the Kato Indians comes up. What was the reason for this choice, and why this particular version?
Again, this is something I came across by chance, while editing the film. I was reading Jérôme Rothenberg’s book and it seemed to me that a voice from the forest had to be in the film. The text by the Kato Indians seemed perfect to me because it is a story from Genesis but also a text that could be post-apocalyptic (the last part comes after Putin’s speech).
Could you elaborate on the choice of inserting this speech by Vladimir Putin to members of the Russian political elite announcing the results of the 2022 referendums and Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian regions? Why did you decide not to subtitle it?
Earlier, I referred to my reading of Demons. Initially, there were two Russian voices, Putin’s (untranslated – one can imagine everything that can come out of this voice) and that of an actor reading an extract from Demons (Stépan Trofimovitch’s escape) which had been translated into French. Two Russian voices opposing each other (Stépan Trofimovitch is a good character) and replying to each other (when you’ve read the novel, you know that Stépan Trofimovitch’s son is evil). I removed this voice as soon as I showed the film to people around me. No one understood what the text was doing there or its meaning… So I only left Putin’s threatening voice in the distance.
The conversation between the man and the woman gives way to a stream of words carried by the sole female voice, thus blurring the lines of discourse. On what need is this based?
A necessity created once again by chance. As I said above, at first I recorded the dialogues as well as the monologues written for this film alone. When I wrote the scene where she goes to kill him in his own home, it was more of a fantasy than a real murder. When I recorded one of the following scenes, an ambulance drove by and I kept that take. There was also the final cannon shot which, once edited, could sound like the woman’s gun (or an approaching hunter). All these elements led me to keep only the woman’s voice at the end, a lone woman re-enacting those scenes over and over again, the words that killed her.
Can you tell us about the night shots of animals that go along with the voices in the film?
The animals are both present, as seen in a specific space-time (Romania, one night), and also the couple’s back-world, where their feelings and words are reverberated (the disharmony between the animals settles in).
At times, the footage captured by the night cameras is filtered by using colors ranging from blue to red. Can you tell us about this feature?
The colors also reflect their moods. I’ve borrowed the traditional meanings attached to these three colors: blue – love, nostalgia, memory; red – anger, passion, jealousy, death; and purple – loneliness, sadness and mourning.
Interview by Marco Cipollini
