26/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: The filmmaker spoke about his second film, which tackles "serious" and "grave" subjects by totally dedramatizing them

Discovered in 2019’s Directors’ Fortnight via his first offbeat feature film, The Bare Necessity [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Erwan Le Duc
film profile], Erwan Le Duc is back on the Croisette with No Love Lost [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Erwan Le Duc
film profile], which screened in the closing slot of the 62nd edition of Critics’ Week within the Cannes Film Festival.

Cineuropa: No Love Lost explores “serious” and “grave” subjects by totally dedramatizing them in nigh-on slapstick fashion. What were your initial intentions for the film?
Erwan Le Duc: I wanted to tell a story of love between a child and a parent. In this instance, it’s a daughter and her father, but it could just as easily have been a mother and her son or a mother and her daughter; to explore that love which is unconditional but also a bit claustrophobic, and the separation of those two individuals. I thought about the tragic side of the story quite early on, a bit like the father character in the film. I wasn’t writing a tragedy, but I realised that the subject was actually dramatic (Ed. The mother suddenly abandons her partner and their baby). But then I relaxed, because I decided, like the father character, that I wouldn’t make a big thing of it. Like him, I didn’t want his partner leaving them to be the defining event of their lives, or for it to be a huge trauma to overcome. I wasn’t interested in taking things in that direction. I wanted her leaving them to result in a shock rather than a total breakdown, and for the father to be determined rather than paralysed by this event. When his daughter is seven, he tells her: "absence isn’t a feeling; a person can give up on love, if they decide to." Clearly, it’s a position which erodes over time, as the character of Youssef highlights by stating that as soon as your wife leaves you, your life becomes tragic. This question permeates the film. Is it a tragedy or a comedy? How should you take it?

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The film explores art and sport…
They’re quite personal things to me. As a teen, I did both. I played football in little clubs and, in the evenings, I’d converted my parents’ garage into a painting studio, even though I didn’t know anything about it. What I do know is that I wanted to talk about those little clubs in the suburbs or in the provinces, with full-on coaches for whom it’s their whole life; genuinely moving characters whom I’ve known really well and who invest far too much of their lives into these clubs, and who are teachers, too, which also interested me in terms of the film’s subject. But for the father character, football is mostly a framework, as the painting will be for the daughter. Because, at a certain point, these two characters, who have built their lives up around an absence, still needed to give themselves a framework of their own, for themselves, a passion to lend structure to their lives. She has brushes gliding across the canvas while he marks out lines on a pitch, even when he doesn’t need to, because it’s a source of comfort for him.

You lean towards slapstick in the film. Why?
For me, films are about telling a story and stirring emotions. They’re two separate forces which have to work together. Humour, gags and slapstick came thick and fast when we shot the film. They’re really joyful moments in the production process and I think it shows in the film. Slapstick comes to me almost unconsciously, but I’m inspired by Keaton, Kaurismäki, Kitano, people who can impose a strong approach when it comes to form and tell a tale from a very unique viewpoint, with humour always hiding into a corner and ready to rear its head. Navigating between emotions and humour is to allow yourself to be enveloped, it’s something akin to enchantment.

(Translated from French)