30/03/2022 - After French Blood, the filmmaker is diving into the political cauldron once again with his crepuscular work The World of Yesterday, which hits French cinemas today

The World of Yesterday [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Diastème
film profile] is Diastème’s fourth feature film after Sunny Spells [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2008), French Blood [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (gracing Toronto’s Platform competition in 2015) and The Summer of All My Parents [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2016). Starring Léa Drucker and Denis Podalydès in the lead roles, this film steered by Marielle Duigou and Philippe Lioret on behalf of Fin Août Productions is released in France today, courtesy of Pyramide, which is also handling the international sales.

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Cineuropa: The World of Yesterday takes us behind the scenes of the French presidency, just a few days before the first round of the presidential elections, in a democracy all the more threatened by the coming to power of the extreme right, given that the best placed candidate in the Republican camp is soon to be unmasked by way of a secret political bombshell. What attracted you to this subject-matter and how did you go about developing it?
Diastème: When I first got this idea, I thought it would make a good subject for a political thriller. I’d already explored this subject-matter in French Blood but using a totally different form. In terms of the writing, I’d been interested in politics for 30 years, but I didn’t have all the cards in my hands, so I needed collaborators. The journalists Fabrice Lhomme and Gérard Davet had previously contacted me, after French Blood was released, about turning one of their books into a film. That project didn’t come to anything, but we stayed in contact. So I went to them with my idea, asking whether they’d agree to work with me. Every 10 days during the writing phase I would show them my work, we’d have a coffee together and they’d give me feedback. I asked them lots of questions and that’s how we proceeded throughout the entire writing phase. They gave me the details I needed, but they also gave me a lot of freedom in terms of the language, because I knew it would be a wordy film with lots of dialogue. I wanted to know how these people [editor’s note: the President, Prime Minister, Secretary General of the Presidency, party candidates, etc.] spoke to one another. What kinds of bonds did they have? What were their formal relationships like? When did they move from formal to informal address? etc. They told me a wealth of stories and I was free to make things up based on those.

Why did you opt for a female president reaching the end of her term rather than a male president?
It was a bit of a practical choice because I really didn’t want it to be a film à clef; with a female president, we wouldn’t feel the same need to compare her with any of the other 5th Republic presidents. But first and foremost, given that I wanted to write an Elizabethan drama, having a president called Elizabeth worked really well. I also really liked the idea of not having too much virility in the film, of it being more of a battle of ideas, especially between her and her Secretary General. And even if it’s a political thriller, a gothic tale, or whatever you want to classify it as, when it comes to its subtext it’s also a love story.

The character of the Secretary General offers a captivating contrast in terms of his position as a high-ranking civil servant who’s a political driving force and a key cog in the wheel, but who also has a good dose of opaqueness about him.
He’s an éminence grise. Without going into recent examples, some of them even went to prison for their opaqueness. They’re fascinating characters who you also see in mafia films: they’re both omniscient and highly obscure. And in real life, the Secretary General of the Élysée Palace is clearly the most powerful figure in France, although in my film we don’t use that name; I call it the presidential palace.

Why did you choose this slightly offbeat form rather than the realism of an Elizabethan drama?
I wanted it to be a Greek tragedy, an Elizabethan drama, something along those lines. I didn’t necessarily want the film to be realistic, but I did want it to have the power of a drama because the story arc was heading in that direction. That’s also why I called the film The World of Yesterday, in reference to the life of Stefan Zweig. What’s more, there’s a slightly theatrical force to the tale, given that it all unfolds in three days.

What about the crepuscular atmosphere? Is it a reflection of ailing politics? The threat of the extreme right’s rise to power is a highly topical form of realism.
I knew the film would be very dark. It was what I wanted from the very beginning, for it to be closely linked to Greek tragedy but also to my cinematic idea of the film. As for the second part of your question, when I wrote French Blood six years ago, the rise of the extreme right and of fascism in general, whether political or religious, already felt pretty intrusive and the situation has only got worse. I find all of that really difficult to deal with, even as a director and screenwriter who’s able to do something else and not look at what’s going on in the world: I struggled to look the other way. It’s the biggest short-term threat to our society.

(Translated from French)