Félix Dutilloy-Liégeois and Marguerite de Hillerin • Directors of A criança
“It seems to us that cinema is the most powerful medium to talk about disappearance and loss”
- The French directing duo discuss their 16th century-set feature debut, a costume drama with a difference
French directing duo Félix Dutilloy-Liégeois and Marguerite de Hillerin have just presented, in the Tiger Competition at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, their feature debut A criança [+see also:
film review
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interview: Félix Dutilloy-Liégeois and…
film profile], a film about a young man adopted by a wealthy couple of French-Portuguese merchants in 16th century Portugal. We talked to them about their choice of topic and its relationship with their previous work, about the film’s representation of the era, as well as about some decisions regarding the film’s visual aesthetic and cast.
Cineuropa: What in Heinrich von Kleist’s short story Der Findling caught your attention and made you want to adapt it for the screen?
Félix Dutilloy-Liégeois: We are attracted to Kleist’s texts as they are sharp, straightforward and radical, neither romantic nor classical. Der Findling in particular is full of themes we were interested in: disappearance, identity confusion, ambiguity of inheritance, loss, love and death, disorder of desires, and above all a relationship with one’s own image.
Marguerite de Hillerin: Der Findling was written in the year of Kleist’s suicide, so it seems created in a state of emergency. It is an open text with cracks that allowed us to project ourselves into them, to bring the cinema in. We reinvented a shadowed character such as Tartuffe in Kleist’s narrative, so as to create Bela and invest problematics of young people into him. We also developed new characters around him, like Jacques for example.
Your mid-length film Ruins in Summer also deals with themes such as disappearance, loss and replacement. Is there a link between the two works?
F D-L: Yes, it tells the story of a couple that lost a child, and just when they are about to commit suicide simultaneously, the man’s younger brother comes back from abroad. In a way, they experience what the father, Pierre, does in A criança.
MdH: Those stories interest us because they resonate with cinema as a medium that represents the world. In cinema, everything you shoot and use in the final cut is eternal. Everything is captured, and yet, it seems to us that cinema is the most powerful medium to talk about disappearance and loss. This magical contradiction is a mystery we want to continue to explore. This feeling of absence-presence is the deepest secret of life.
How about the process of transferring German literature to the Portuguese 16th century?
MdH: Kleist’s short story is actually set in Italy and Paulo Branco, our producer, told us we would possibly shoot in Portugal. Therefore, we looked carefully into Portuguese history. We found their mid-16th century fascinating (in its beauty and violence): a kind of apogée that is right before its slow decline; every aspect of it was rich with turning points that were echoing the story we wanted to tell.
F D-L: There is also a King at this time, João III, who lost all his brothers and sisters, and all his children. His last son dies while his wife is pregnant, and so the heir not-yet-borned is awaited by the whole country because if there is no heir when the King dies, Portugal will pass under the Spain monarchy. During the writing, the story and the history of Portugal melted in an effective way. It was making sense.
The naturalistic close-ups are especially notable and they differentiate the film from the usual visual style seen in costume dramas. What were your intentions behind this approach?
F D-L: It was important for us to feel the contemporary body under the epoch costume. So, firstly, we asked the actors to find a language within their body and only after to play with the costume. The written characters lived five centuries ago, they are dead, but the actors who are playing are living today. To approach this life and the universality of the story, it was also necessary to find the places where the period doesn’t exist or hardly exists: the woods, a river, the grass, a wild field, the sky. But another place is the face of each character/actor. So, we filmed the faces as we filmed a tree, a natural element. Close enough to feel the life that runs within it: the movement of an eye or lips, their trembling, etc. For the make-up, we worked with the artist Ana Lorena who has a great sense of skins. We wanted to see the skin and to feel every live motion on it.
What was your approach in the casting process? Did you already have in mind João Arrais, for example, while writing the script, or did you choose him afterwards?
MdH: We discussed the cast with Paulo Branco, who had great suggestions on who could play some of the roles. We had a feeling that João Arrais would be perfect as Bela (we had seen him recently in the short film Bad Bunny by Carlos Conceição) and Paulo immediately agreed. We held meetings and reading of scenes rather than formal auditions, as we needed mostly to see if we could build a common language with the actors. This is how we met Inês Pires Tavares, who plays Rosa, and who had a great way of listening and reacting during our first encounter. The main challenge was to build a team of persons who liked the script, who wanted to participate in a first feature film and who were convinced that we knew what we wanted to tell and create.
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