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Laurent Cantet • Director

The taboos of feminine desire

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In official competition at Venise Mostra 2005, French filmmaker Laurent Cantet has made a disconcerting third feature Vers le Sud [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laurent Cantet
interview: Robin Campillo
interview: Simon Arnal-Szlovak
film profile
]
. From its originality of subject matter – that of feminine sexual tourism in the tropics – to his choice to treat in a quasi-documentary manner the reality of Haitian life, the director of Ressources Humaines and of L’Emploi du temps a explained his motivations to an intrigued international press.

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What’s the real subject of Vers le Sud: feminine sexual tourism or the distance, a mix of fascination and impossibility, which separates the westerners and the Haitians?
The film deals with intimate stories that one could generalize as sexual tourism. I tried to play with the clichés of the postcard (the golden beaches, the coconut trees…), but behind all that, there is something we think we understand, which we have a vague notion of but remains distant. Obviously, I know that there is an element of prostitution in the film. But the characters have been created in a spirit of exchange. It’s not a case of poor young men on one side and old women who exploit them on the other. The hotel is a little world cut off from the outside, a kind of false paradise where these women forget their frustrations and where the boys find a tenderness that doesn’t exist in their outside world. Each of the women are trying to find their place in this environment, Helen (Charlotte Rampling) by constructing Utopia, Brenda (Karen Young) by projecting herself into a romantic vision with Prince Charming, and Sue (Louise Portal) by building a relationship that is more like the daily life of a married couple.

Were you faithful to the short story by Dany Laferrière on which the film was the based?
Vers le Sud is the title of one of the short stories in his collection La chair du maître. Dany Laferrière was obliged to go into exile under the Duvalier regime because he was under threat of death from the Tontons Macoutes. In fact, we used three short stories definitively, mixing with characters from other stories and anecdotes I had heard in Haiti. Otherwise, I stayed faithful by placing the film in the 70s, an era when Port-au-Prince was a rendez-vous for the American jet-set. So my two principal characters came from the States, a country where Puritanism is no doubt stronger than in Europe or in Canada. Or, rather, I think the more the Puritanism is anchored, the more excesses are likely.

Why did you want to demonstrate the extent to which feminine desire has changed?
What I noticed is that the cinema rarely deals with feminine desire. We often see desirable women, but the desires of women over 40 remains a theme broached very cautiously and is still a taboo zone. This desire demanded and even held in high esteem for men is less accepted for women. I kept in the final edit the monologues of the three women since they are talking of their sexuality in their own words which are difficult to find.

And if the women of Vers le Sud had been men?
In choosing women, we avoid the clichés on sexual tourism and it is the characters who are judged. Deep down, my film retraces the face-to-face of two groups of dominated people with a power which circulates among them, since the whole thing falls apart if it was just the women.

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