The opening film of the 57th Directors' Fortnight at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Enzo [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Robin Campillo
scheda film] is Robin Campillo's 5th feature, but it is a very special work for the French filmmaker who has taken on the last project from his long-time friend and professional accomplice (of whom he was co-writer and editor on numerous occasions), the late Laurent Cantet.

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Cineuropa : How did the idea for the film come about? At what stage did you get involved?
Robin Campillo : This story about a kid who doesn't feel he belongs to the same social class as his family had been running around in Laurent Cantet's head for almost 10 years. He started working with Gilles Marchand and wrote a treatment of around twenty pages. He was then diagnosed with cancer and, as things could get worse, I suggested that he return to our original partnership, but even more closely, as if I were his pilot fish. It was to give him a bit of joy, a bit of impetus. I'd read what he'd written, I was very enthusiastic and I felt that I could help him, take over the shoot with the actors when he was going through more or less heavy treatment, and then edit the film. So we set out in a difficult situation, but with a kind of jubilation at finding ourselves again. It was very pleasant to write the script together, even though he was obviously very tired at times. Then he cast the four main actors: the two non-professionals (Eloy Pohu and Maksym Slivinskyi), Pierfrancesco Favino and Élodie Bouchez. He told them fairly quickly that he was ill. But two months before the shoot, his condition suddenly worsened and he died. His partner Isabelle, the producer Marie-Ange Luciani and I had a chat with him in his hospital room, telling him that we'd be happy to make the film, and we went from there.

What excited you about the story?
Laurent tackled the subject quite head-on. It's not about adolescence as a pathology or a family crisis, etc., but as an almost political enigma. I felt that this subject had not been dealt with very much. And Laurent was also very interested in the fluidity of love and sex in youth.

Is finding your place at the heart of the film?
Human Resources ended with the sentence: “Where is your place?” This question was always very strong with Laurent, who felt that the social order gave us very defined places, particularly in France where the Minister of Education recently even talked about choosing one's orientation at nursery school, which is grotesque. But our place is always negotiated, always open to question and never completely acceptable. And while parents choose themselves, children don't choose them: the family is undoubtedly one of the most random structures in society. Enzo is a kid who has a pretty clear vision of what he doesn't want to belong to. We didn't take as our model teenagers who stand up to their parents, who argue with their parents, but rather Melville's Bartleby or that kind of character who resists a force of inertia. Enzo isn't weak, in fact he's quite strong in some respects, but he's questioning his place and trying to make a difference. That's why he asks Vlad to go off to war in Ukraine with him, because he wants to be swept along.

The parents' confusion, each reacting to Enzo with their own personality, is dealt with in small details and adds an extra layer to the film.
For Laurent, it was necessary to bring out their flaws, to feel the tensions, but also to show that they are a couple who still love and desire each other. This was important because we wanted to make a very sunny, very sensual film. But we reversed the roles a little: the mother is a woman who is more at work than at home and who almost stands back from what's going on there. Whereas the father is more involved in his children's day-to-day lives, benevolently but involuntarily in control, and he traps himself in his son's anguish: in reality, it's his own anguish that he's bringing out. We thought this interplay of mirrors between the characters was very interesting.

What were your main intentions in terms of directing?
With Laurent, we decided to make a very simple, very drawn film, with shot-reverse-shots and frames a little like Murnau for the building site scenes (without comparing ourselves to this genius, of course) to highlight the characters. There was also the question of embodiment. The film starts on the building site and the first thing we see of Enzo is him looking up at the sky, then at his hands against the background of the soil. He's a kid with a huge dream who decides to face up to the harshness of reality. It started from very simple things like that. Then there was the idea of being with this teenager who is more on the side of the night and the moon, in a film that is predominantly sunny. The characters are bathed in light and sensuality, with a kind of explosion of feelings, desire and so on. We always talk about Laurent as a realist filmmaker, but he was also a great fan of Minelli and he always created a tension close to melodrama. In Enzo, there was this desire to show what was inside the heart of this teenager, in other words an explosion of colour, light and sensuality, like an inner storm.