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Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu • Cannes 2005

Peindre et faire l’amour : Dark desires step into the light

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With Peindre et faire l’amour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu
interview: Philippe Martin
film profile
]
, the Larrieu brothers persevere in their vision of cinema anchored to daily life and bathed by Nature. With themes far removed from the Cannes sunlight which doesn’t affect the unshakeable calm of the two filmmakers from the Pyrenees.

The renaissance of a couple removed from the contingences of town life and their professions, was that the central notion that guided the screenplay for To paint or to make love?
Jean-Marie Larrieu: the title of the film itself holds the key to the fate of our two principal characters (Daniel Auteuil and Sabine Azéma). What happens when a social life comes to an end? All the important things, desire, sex, love…, we wanted these things to happen to ordinary people. They experience powerful events, notably the obscure and they come back out again like Morpheus. They’re not heroes, but exceptional things can happen to ordinary people.

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Nature plays an essential role in your film. How did you set about filming it?
Jean-Marie Larrieu: the landscapes are huge naked bodies which we cross. Nudity is vulnerability, intimacy. And that fits one of the themes of our film: the "first times" which happen to all of us and which come along in cycles and according to the seasons.
Arnaud Larrieu: you have to bear in mind that the aim of the film was to eroticise the countryside with selective cutting. The project was written for the Pyrenees but for production reasons, we found ourselves in the Vercors. But you only need to stop off somewhere, to walk round a bit and fiction presents itself.

The first half of the story is more conventional, the second more transgressive. Was that a deliberate strategy?
Jean-Marie Larrieu: we followed the natural incline of the piece, to the point where the two couples meet. It’s not a cunning film, since the tenderness is shown very openly from the beginning. They are just a bourgeois couple who have dinner parties, enjoy an aperitif.
Arnaud Larrieu: the couple Auteuil-Azema are sort of trapped, they chose a blind man but without realising that he could read their thoughts. In the second half of the film, desires step into the light while before they stayed in the darkness.

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