04/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Carine Tardieu explains the intricate story in her film about family ties which go beyond blood and the effect of the passing of time

(© Giorgio Zucchiatti/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

Presented in the 81st Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti competition, The Ties That Bind Us [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carine Tardieu
film profile] is French director Carine Tardieu’s 5th feature film.

Cineuropa: What made you want to adapt Alice Ferney’s novel L’Intimité?
Carine Tardieu: Her publisher sent it to me. When I first read it, I was confused because I really liked how the book started with the meeting between a librarian woman and a grieving man, but then the novel took off in a totally different direction and basically lost sight of the main character, Sandra, to introduce a new character who I was far less interested in. So I put the novel aside, until the day Fanny Ardant – who I was working with – randomly said: "I think there’s a film for you in that story". As a result, I re-read the book, trying to understand why it had moved me and focusing on what I’d liked: Sandra’s character.

And why the structure of twelve chapters spanning two years?
The idea of dividing the film up according to the age of baby Lucille who develops in line with the story, came to me when I saw Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
film profile]: its ellipses drive forward a story which also explores family ties and something which puts a strain on the relationships between the characters, which I really liked. It also managed to move from one moment in the characters’ stories to another, skipping other unworkable moments. I’ve also noticed, since becoming a mother, that time goes by far more quickly watching our children grow up than when we don’t have children. This irreversibility speaks to the strength of the bond between Sandra (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and the family. Once we’ve gone beyond certain levels of attachment, there’s no going back. What’s more, given that the birth of the little girl coincides with the mother’s death, the story also punctuates the stages of grief which Alex’s character (played by Pio Marmaï) has to go through.

Do ties and love always go hand in hand?
I get the feeling that attachment is a potential path towards love. I studied psychology a long time ago and I thought back to John Bowlby who worked on attachment and young children. In his opinion, the first person the newborn attaches to most of the time is the mother, basically out of a vital need. Love then springs out of this. I wanted to depict that in the relationship which Sandra, Alex and little Elliot (César Botti) forge between them. Elliot’s attachment to Sandra is vital to begin with, because he finds himself alone with an unstable father (Raphaël Quenard) and a stepdad, Alex, who’s there but who’s lost in his own grief. For Elliot, attaching himself to Sandra is also a way of not betraying his mother, the person he loved and who’s now dead. As for Sandra, she grows attached to them on impulse because she can tell they really need her. Their relationship then develops in line with their personalities. But as Sandra says to Alex at a certain point: "I’m just the one who was there at the time". And she’s not wrong because they needed someone and she was the first port in the storm.

What were your main intentions for the film’s mise en scène?
The more time goes by, the more I want my films to be as straightforward as possible. One of my inspirations is Claude Sautet, whose cinema seems very simple (basically consisting of shots and reverse shots and a few wide shots) but it’s actually incredibly detailed. When it came to making my film, I watched his films again, as well as Noah Baumbach’s, and films by others who seem to adopt a lighter mise en scène approach. In a certain sense, I wanted the camera to be attached to the family, too, for us to stay with them. And even though I’m a director who controls a lot and who’s committed to respecting the original text, we needed some level of lightness. What I then noticed in the editing phase, and what I hadn’t thought about until then, was that the film is far more musical than I’d imagined.

(Translated from French)