Bérangère McNeese • Director of The Girls From Above
"I wanted to explore the limits of a group, how it can sometimes provide a home but one whose doors are locked and bolted"
- The Belgian actress chatted with us about her first feature-length directorial effort which follows a young woman who finds refuge with a gang of girls
Actress Bérangère McNeese presented the world premiere of her first feature, The Girls From Above [+see also:
film review
interview: Bérangère McNeese
film profile], in competition at the Namur International Francophone Film Festival. Following a young woman who finds refuge with a gang of girls who help her negotiate the hasty transition to adulthood, the movie has also just scooped three prizes at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz International Film Festival.
Cineuropa: How did this project come about?
Bérangère McNeese: I knew that I wanted to look at a few different things, subjects that are a key part of my desire to write which I’d already tackled in my previous films in a patchy way and which I wanted to bring together in this work: how brutal it can be for women, how their bodies are brought into play, and the question of female cohabitation, underlining the sorority at work but using more realism than fantasy. How do we live together when we’re all a little bit damaged? Can we help others heal when we’re struggling ourselves and not equipped to do so? What’s fascinating is that these questions have been evolving at breakneck speed for some years now. I’ve even evolved myself in terms of how I broach these themes in the writing process.
How did the characters who’d embody these group dynamics come to you?
I really wanted to work with Héloïse Volle again. I never get bored of watching her act and I wanted to see her evolve from a director’s viewpoint. Héloïse is a character who observes, so she had to have things to see; that’s how I created the girls around her, they had to be interesting to watch. Mallory is a character who’s always been in my head, who has a kind of inner fire which burns everything in its path, which is fascinating and inspiring but also frightening. Obviously, we had to find the actress who’d be capable of embodying all that, and Shirel Nataf was an obvious choice as soon as I saw her. I was actually really reassured when I saw her, because I was fully aware that I couldn’t mess up on the cast, that it would be critical for the success of the story. Jenna and Mona also needed to impose themselves vis-à-vis the other girls, each in their own way.
The film explores sorority and the power of the group, but also the importance of being able to escape it.
Yes, the importance of finding a place where we feel safe at pivotal moments in our lives. It also explores our role models, the people who guide and inspire us. Other women whom we see reacting in very specific situations. But, obviously, we also need to explore the limits of the group, how it can sometimes represent a home but one whose doors are locked and bolted. And how some people, despite their best intentions, can also cause harm.
Our relationship with our body, an object of desire, of envy, of control but also of emancipation is likewise examined.
I was interested in showing how we see other people’s attitude towards our bodies changing at that age, and how destabilising that can be. And how that body can be a weakness and a weapon. When we decide to turn it into a strength and a form of power over others, how do we do this? Obviously, the idea wasn’t to make things black and white, with men as evil and girls as victims; I wanted to study the dynamics involved. In theory, Héloïse has a clear understanding of how to wield that power. But in practice, she finds it far harder to move from one state of mind to the other.
The film also shows a kind of precariousness that we don’t often see with women on screen.
Yes, they’re all about getting by. They live in that run-down apartment. I really liked the idea of it still being a refuge for her, but of it starting to feel increasingly like a prison. My director of photography and I spoke a lot about this, and especially about how to make a girls’ film which wouldn’t feel like a girls’ film. We wanted to create a universe which we felt women would inhabit, without sliding into clichés. And I have to say, it made me think a lot about myself as a woman, on a lot of different levels!
(Translated from French)
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