Unveiled in competition at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, with Camille Cottin heading up the cast, Out of Love [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Nathan Ambrosioni
scheda film] is 25-year-old French filmmaker Nathan Ambrosioni’s 3rd feature film after Paper Flags [+leggi anche:
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trailer
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scheda film].

Cineuropa: What drew you to the subject of voluntary disappearances?
Nathan Ambrosioni: I was visiting the Avignon Film Festival in 2019 and I saw a synopsis of a stage play (which I haven’t seen) which mentioned voluntary disappearances. It soon started to play on my mind. I was also experiencing a kind of anger, because my sister who’d left home when I was a teen had just left France at that point. So I started to look into it, and the subject stayed with me for a long time, until I felt ready to tackle it in a more measured way, without judging, first and foremost, and without making a film which encouraged judgement, but a film about family, absence, how we move forwards despite the missing pieces. Not a film about the void left by the voluntary disappearance, but about how the individual tries to fill that void.

The starting point for your film is one of the worst kinds of voluntary disappearances since it involves leaving children behind. How much investigative work did you carry out before writing the screenplay?
I spent the first year of writing talking to police officers, social workers, a family court judge, a psychologist, etc.; lengthy discussions which helped me to construct the film, which I wanted to be as realistic as possible on this particular subject. So I had that as a starting point, that voluntary disappearance, but there needed to be something left behind, and that’s where the children come in. In Toni, I explored an exaggerated, supersized experience of motherhood, with five children. In this instance, I wanted to do the opposite: to talk about how, sometimes, that maternal feeling isn’t there or it’s disappeared, or it unravels.

Motherhood, sisterhood, family past, filiation: how did you explore all these aspects while keeping things simple?
I like seeming simplicity, depicting the human condition in pretty straightforward terms. Jeanne disappearing and leaving her children behind seems inhuman, so we try to understand why it isn’t inhuman, not by justifying it but by deconstructing family patterns (where we come from, what makes us belong). I really liked the idea of an inverted drama, a film which starts with the hardest part of the story. Instead of building up tension to breaking point, it starts with the worst before developing from there and unpeeling the different layers of their past. I didn’t want the film to obsess over the social issue of voluntary disappearances, I wanted it to focus on the lives of the characters, their nuances. And as I was writing for Camille Cottin, who I wanted to make another film with, I already had my main character Suzanne in my head.

You also show a range of viewpoints in the film, going from the main character Suzanne’s to the children’s.
As adult viewers, we probably identify more with Suzanne’s viewpoint, but I did want that variety of perspectives. There are probably just as many scenes from the children’s viewpoint in the screenplay as there are of Suzanne’s. I wanted their perspectives to collide. The children Gaspard and Margot’s viewpoints are also dissimilar, because of their age difference (ten and six years old). I see it as different moments in an explosion: the mother, Jeanne, represents the heart of the bomb, Gaspard is the deflagration and Margot is the radioactivity that comes afterwards.

How did you bring this very tight and intimate film to life?
I’m a big fan of "home-based drama": Kore-eda, Ozu or Edward Yang’s films, for example. I needed an element of suffocation for this story which unfolds indoors. The characters live in small and somewhat cramped spaces, but I wanted to film plenty of it in wide shots and for there to be some sort of contradiction. We also did a lot of shooting through windows and from a distance, as if someone were observing the situation. But as it’s an inverted drama, they had to be able to escape their suffocating context, through parks, open spaces, the kind of imagination you’d see in 80s films like Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People by Robert Redford or The Panic in Needle Park.