Alex Lutz is back at the Cannes Film Festival with his new film Connemara [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Alex Lutz
ficha de la película], adapted from the latest novel by Nicolas Mathieu (winner of the Prix Goncourt for Leurs enfants après eux), a social melodrama about two lovers trying to rekindle the fire of youthful love against all the odds, played by Mélanie Thierry and Bastien Bouillon.

Cineuropa: What made you decide to adapt the novel?
Alex Lutz: I had already really enjoyed Nicolas Mathieu's world in Leurs enfants après eux, but what really grabbed me in Connemara was this singular and complex portrait of a woman. Hélène is neither guilty nor a victim. I also liked the way the story followed the character's state of mind, her hesitations, and the resonance of this thwarted love story. Finally, in the novel, there is also a strong presence of the body, the body in the making during adolescence, the body that has become adult, the passage of time is very present, but also the social body. I wanted to weave all these elements together, drawing inspiration in particular from the way Nicolas Mathieu approaches the question of the social body in a way that is never pedagogical, but in a truly vibrant way, by seeking it out in the intimate lives of the characters. Everything is very organically linked.

Precisely what cinematographic means did you use to weave the story, in which we feel both an aesthetic of fragment and of superposition, particularly through the desynchronisation of sound and image?
One thing, for example, that was very important to me was that I didn't want to stage Hélène's memories as reconstructions of events, but rather as impressions. You don't see yourself in your memories, you see details, and sometimes you're there at the start of the shot, as it were. That's what I was trying to share, these bursting effects. As for the discrepancy between the voice-overs on the soundtrack and the images, it's also a way of evoking how our timing isn't always ideal in life: we say or do things too soon or too late, conversations come back to us that shed light on what's happening, or the opposite. A way of embroidering time.

While the film is firmly rooted in social issues, its tone tends towards the melodramatic, with a breath of romance running through it.
It was clear to me from the outset that I didn't want to take a documentary approach to the territory or the environment. For me, it was all about the little things, the material of a piece of clothing, the sound of a puffer jacket, the layout of the rooms in a house. These are the details that reveal social barriers and differences, without having to highlight them. And the notion of class has in any case become a very porous one, and it's clear that the same questions cut across different backgrounds, a feeling of grief perhaps, or of having done everything right, but without it working out.

Can we talk a little about your actors?
I find that Mélanie Thierry brings something very concrete to the story, while at the same time embracing its romantic dimension. And then she has this ability to embody the variation of feelings with great virtuosity, in the smallest details. As for Bastien Bouillon, I was looking for an actor who could play Christophe without falling into the trap of being a sporty guy, who could infuse him with a form of elegance and even femininity.

Their relationship raises the question: can love resolve the social divide? Their backgrounds, or at least where they came from, differentiate them, but so does their relationship to movement: Hélène is constantly on the move, while Christophe is anchored.
Yes, Hélène lives in a kind of eulogy of flight. She's constantly on the move, trying to escape from repetition, from the transmission of a fixed relationship to existence, from mother to daughter. Christophe, on the other hand, seeks to secure things, to anchor them. He supports both his father and his son. In the end, beyond their opposing social backgrounds, what stands in their way is perhaps above all a question of timing. When Christophe wants to stop things, Hélène is in a moment of her life that's like a parenthesis, destined to disappear. Sometimes I even wonder if it's really a love story that binds them together, if it's not rather a need for consolation, which they each encounter at that moment, that brings them together.