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Bertrand Bonello • Director

“My Tiresia's, a modern clairvoyant"

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- A modern take on a Greek myth where French cinema's enfant terrible turns the blind oracle into a Brazilian transsexual in Paris

According to Greek mythology, Tiresia was a woman, then a man, then a woman again. Bertrand Bonello, the 35-year-old French director back in Cannes after his 2001 apparition at Critics’ Week with Le pornographe, has made mythology a feature of everyday life. He transforms the blind clairvoyant into a Brazilian transsexual who lives on the outskirst of Paris (read the article by Fabien Lemercier). Two newcomers play the transsexual, Clara Couveaux and Thiago Teles whom Bonello chose “for the mystery of their faces. It’s impossible to know more than they reveal”.
Male, female, male... the order of appearance doesn’t matter: “two bodies that are too big, too thin whilst at the same time, impossible to touch and extremely sensual”. Tiresia is certainly a film about the human body and identities that are always subject to queries, today just like three thousand years ago when Ulysses met Tiresia in Hell. “The body and pain is a common factor of everything and destiny is an implacable tragedy,” said Bonello.
Even today? “Mythology was the result of a polytheist society, today the oracle of my film who tells people their future clashes with Church dogma.”
None other than a man of the Church, Father Francois (played by Laurent Lucas) crosses swords with Tiresia. “Laurent Lucas also plays the man who blinds Tiresia in the first part of the film because the two characters are opposing but similar. The first is an aesthete who kidnaps the transsexual to learn the secret of his/her beauty, the second is a man of the spirit who envies Tiresia’s gift of clairvoyance.”
Did Pier Paolo Pasolini play a part in Bonello’s deciding to rework a Greek myth? “Pasolini was one of the great loves of my youth, especially for the ability with which he combined poetry with reality. That is why I went to Italy in 1996 to make a documentary about him”.

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