Meryl Fortunat-Rossi and Valéry Rosier • Directors of Holy Tour
"These cyclists make us think of Christ as he carries his cross"
by Juliette Borel, Tom Sohet - Cinergie.be
- Cinergie met with directors Meryl Fortunat-Rossi and Valéry Rosier to chat about their documentary Holy Tour
Meryl Fortunat-Rossi and Valéry Rosier fix their gaze on things which others tend to overlook, from the pews encircling bullfighting rings to the wanderings of solitary holidaymakers. In Holy Tour [+see also:
trailer
interview: Meryl Fortunat-Rossi and Va…
film profile], they join forces to film the Tour de France, from the standpoint of spectators who are camping out 15 days ahead of the race to ensure they miss nothing of the riders passing by.
Cinergie: Your two respective worlds come together in this film – what made you want to join forces on this subject?
Valéry Rosier: In Brussels, we like to meet up in old bars or in Saint-Gilles petanque club where the regulars tend to be 60 years plus. So, from the very outset, we both felt great affection for this particular audience who aren’t often represented in film and who we wanted to place in the spotlight. The idea of the Tour de France, on the other hand, came to us more by chance. I’d gone to present a film in the mobile Belgian Film Festival, which Meryl organises in the south of France. During the festival itself, we’d meet up to have a nap while watching the Tour de France. We realised that we shared a passion. Which proves that naps really can give rise to some amazing projects!
Meryl Fortunat-Rossi: Exactly, it was time well spent. We were also united in our desire to film aspects of the race which you don’t usually see: to show how much people love the Tour without showing too much of the object of their love...
Did you start by looking for a location or by finding your characters?
VR: First we chose the location: the Col de l’Izoard with its "Casse déserte", a slightly lunar and mythical place. This mountain pass is an important stage of the Tour, without being one of the biggest.
MF-R: It was also the first time that the Tour de France cyclists would have to ride all the way up to the summit of the pass, making it the 3rd highest pass to traverse. It was the last mountain stage that year. When we were positioning our cameras in the final twists and turns, we knew that there’d be the frenzy we were anticipating because that was where the race would be decided.
At first glance, your film doesn’t seem at all “stage-managed”. But in one scene, where we see a couple reading in bed, before turning out the light and falling asleep, an artificiality, of sorts, is revealed; we can imagine you standing at the foot of the bed, filming, and this makes us question the supposed lack of staging in other sequences...
VR: I tend to stage-manage my films, with the help of my protagonists, but that’s not at all the case for Méryl. So, we decided not to do it: 98% of the film consists of freely captured moments, with the exception of a few little scenes we worked on with the characters. For the bedtime scenes, for example, it was a question of respect: that was a private moment for them, and it wasn’t the focus of the film. So, we recreated a bedtime... at the end of the afternoon.
MF-R: With this sequence, everyone knows that it’s impossible for it to be natural: it allows us to wink at the viewer, to tell her/him that we and the protagonists were in this together, that everyone had fun. It’s like some kind of mini making-of interval.
VR: And, somehow, the fact that we say we’re lying means that we’re telling the truth...
You’ve given your film a rather formal structure, developed around the theme of mass. At what point did this particular structure come to mind?
MF-R: It was there back when we were writing the film. “The Holy Tour” is the Tour de France’s nickname: it was easy for us to make the connections.
VR: It offers the same celebration of exertion: these sweating cyclists make us think of Christ as he carries his cross. Religious relics can be compared to the merchandise touted by the publicity fleet, who throw Cochonou bucket hats into the crowd which people are prepared to fight over. There’s also the sacred nature of the mountains.
MF-R: And campers feel this need to be filmed, to become an image; an image which renders its subject immortal through the magic of television archives.
(The full interview can be read in French here.)
In collaboration with
(Translated from French)
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