Provincial Marilyn meets mysterious death in Nobody Else But You

12/01/2011

While 2010 officially closed with 206.5m admissions in France (the best score since 1967) with a 35.5% market share for French films, 11 new releases are hitting screens this Wednesday.

Standing out among them is Gérald Hustache-Mathieu’s detective comedy Nobody Else But You [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (see news), launched by Diaphana on a 163-print run. Starring Jean-Paul Rouve and Sophie Quinton, the film confirms the unconventional talent of the director of April In Love [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2006). It centres on an author suffering from writer’s block who investigates the death of a French provincial "star" who thinks of herself as a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.

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"The character of Marilyn is of course fascinating. What more beautiful enigma than the perfect incarnation of the Hollywood actress, the abandoned orphan who met a tragic and mysterious end?" explained Hustache-Mathieu. "Since my intention wasn’t to make a biopic about Marilyn, I tried to just focus on what connected her to this girl from Mouthe who believed she was her reincarnation. Marilyn embodies the American dream, and beyond that, she embodies dreams full stop. The dream of one day becoming ‘someone’. But she also embodies the other side of the coin: tragedy, the impossibility of being happy."

For the director, the town of Mouthe (nicknamed "Little Siberia") "was a perfect metaphor. It’s a village between borders, where you feel neither completely in France, nor really in Switzerland, a no man’s land where time has no hold and winter goes on forever. Everything leads to you being trapped there; the only way out is to run away."

Produced by Dharamsala and sold by MK2, Nobody Else But You explores "a territory on the fringes of big cities, which often only crops up in conversation when talking about a sordid crime story. This France is more ordinary, more modest, a bit neglected, where dreams are inevitably less attainable."

Also hitting theatres this Wednesday are Philippe Guillard’s Le Fils à Jo (“Jo’s Son”, a film about rugby starring Gérard Lanvin and Olivier Marchal – released by Gaumont on almost 540 screens); Daniel Barber’s UK feature Harry Brown [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Surreal Distribution – 80-print run); Denis Villeneuve’s Canadian/French co-production Scorched [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Happiness Distribution – 70 screens); and Charles de Meaux’s Stretch [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (MK2 Diffusion).