Engine and action! This Friday, November 24th, the France Télévisions community is invited to discover a real fake behind the scenes like no other through Split.
In this French mini-series, Anna (Alma Jodorowsky), a young 30-year-old stuntwoman, falls in love on the set of a movie with Eva (Jenny Bett), the star of the movie she is in and who she is. Voice over.. She who thought she was happy in her relationship with Nathan (Ralph Amousu) and who has been trying to have a baby with him for several years, is wondering. Will he have the courage to abandon heterosexuality to fully experience this emerging and overwhelming desire for Eve, an open lesbian?
For Allociné, the creator divisionIris Bray, also an academic, author and film critic, agreed to return to film her first series.
Allociné: In recent years, you have dedicated several works to the representation of women and sexuality in series and films, such as e.g. Sex and TV series (2018), The female gaze, a revolution on the screen (2020) or The culture of incest (2022).
How was the transition from theory to practice? What made you want to tell this love story?
Iris Bray: For me, this series is a continuation of a little gesture. I didn’t think of it as a break from anything. I get the impression that being a film scholar and before that teaching film were all experiences that helped me a lot in directing, whether it was cutting a scene or explaining my intentions to my team.
And then I tried to write fiction for quite some time. I don’t know why it finally happened in this series…
Where did this original idea of narrating the everyday life of a stuntman come from?
By re-reading the file for the director who dedicated the documentary to the stuntmen. Then I realized that it is a very male profession and that, in most cases, they have to shoot scenes of domestic violence or sexual violence, because there are very few films in France where female characters have action scenes.
After that I also saw a photo that Clotilda Hesme showed me of her and her stuntman with whom they filmed for the TV series Lupine. (Netflix). I found it very interesting that on set there can be confusion created through body similarities and movements, while in real life the two women are extremely different.
Enlisting my main character in this profession, which requires moving, acting, but also taking care – because there is a stuntman there so that the actor does not get hurt – made sense. I found it great to be able to create eroticism and desire out of the treatment.
always together divisionYou play a lot split screenAn effect common in films, but quite rare in series, and which consists of dividing the screen into several parts to display several images at once.
Why is this an artistic choice? How did this serve a particularly feminist purpose and strange What do you stand for in your series?
often split screen Used to create a suspension. So I almost took the opposite approach because there’s actually quite a bit of suspense in my series. In fact, I told myself that it would be very interesting to think about it split screen As a way to be able to feel what a character is going through, but also to create connections between characters that don’t necessarily develop together all the time.
Initially, what I was interested in was starting from this cinematic process and re-appropriating it to tell a story of division, but above all, reparation. I thought we hadn’t seen much of this black line used as a scar line, which can also hold several things together.
In one of the episodes, you share the audio archive of the actor Delphine SeirigWho says: “Cinema is not an industry that follows the evolution of women of my time. It cannot advance much. It depends on progress and then cinema will advance.”
In your view, this also applies to television and broadcast platforms. stream today? Was this series project a hard sell?
Yes, of course. The people who make decisions and give you money are rarely our age or younger. It takes a lot of luck for them to understand that our stories are important and why we want to tell them in one way or another.
On the other hand, I’m lucky because france.tv slash is a kind of laboratory that allows new voices and new themes to emerge. I felt that I could experience many things with them. I could not do a split on another channel. So, first of all, it was necessary to find a balance between creative freedom and having very little money to bring to life the images I had in mind.
You were also limited by audiovisual production regulations…
Yes. In fact, there is an ethics office that must classify each work to be able to guide viewers. I understand its usefulness very well. Simply, on france.tv slash, if a work is classified as “not for children under 16”, it can only appear on the platform between 10pm and 5.30am. On the other hand, on platforms like Netflix, a small “-16” logo is affixed and the work can remain. Naturally, I want to reach as many people as possible. It was important to me that this series was visible beyond the wee hours, otherwise it would put us in the closet once again.
Therefore, I shortened the duration of the sex scenes in episodes 2 and 3, especially the orgasms, in order to make the series “not for children under 12” and thus remain accessible. On the other hand, I didn’t succeed for episode 4 because of the scene syringe . However, this is a fairly light scene where we see very little. I think it’s great to see this kind of representation in feminist TV series and not just on porn sites.
why even today “Every lesbian kiss is a revolution”Paraphrased by, among others, Alice Coffin A lesbian genius ?
Because it destabilizes the patriarchy. Showing lesbian joy is political. We are so tired of lesbian stories that are based on impossible loves or that tell us that being a lesbian is too difficult and sad, that I absolutely wanted to take the opposite view of these stories that always end badly.
Even just to show the joy of being together among women, to show women thinking together, organizing, emancipating themselves as splicers, that’s political. It is the best weapon to expose inequality and fight against oppression.
Documentary film, the so-called Sex is a Comedy: The Intimacy Coordinator Revolutionand which follows intimacy coordinator Paloma García Martens on set divisionIt will be released with your series on france.tv slash.
How is the intimacy coordinator a new profession that will benefit from being better known and systematized on set?
I spoke to many actors and actresses and they all told me about the problems they had on set, especially during intimate scenes. I know that in France there is a lot of opposition on this topic, because we get the impression that there is censorship and that someone will come between the director and his actors.
Personally, I see my work as a director as a collective work, that is, I have a vision and share it with people who help me realize it. For example, in the case of stunts, I naturally turned to a specific advisor so that the stuntman’s body would not be in danger. It seems normal to me.
Intimate scenes put the actors in extreme vulnerability because the boundary between reality and fiction becomes very porous during these scenes. I don’t believe in magic and naturalness in sex scenes at all. You can work on nature. I don’t want my actors to destroy themselves for the sex scenes, I want it to be their character and for that there has to be a framework and a choreography that the actors can rehearse to portray them. My sex scenes aren’t there for decoration, they’re there to tell the evolution of a character, whether it’s discovery, fear, or seeing him let go.
And then, I get the impression that it’s a pretty big show of trust and love to tell the actors that I’ve asked someone to be there to take care of them and that “they can talk if something’s wrong.” I don’t want to tell me.
At the end of the documentary you say you are working on a film. Can you tell us more?
Yes! I’m writing a feature film about a love story between two women set in Athens. I want to update the pre-movie trilogy By Richard Linklater, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. These are stories of impossible romantic wanderings between two characters, first in Vienna, then in Paris. I fed on it. I thought it would be interesting to ask what it’s like to fall in love at 40 rather than 25.
So are you really behind on TV series and movie reviews? Or, after the series, do you just want to try your hand at another medium, in this case feature film?
I do not know. I feel that I have reached the end of the cycle with my efforts. Now I prefer writing fiction. I don’t know yet what new cycle I will open. Lets see… !
Comments collected in Paris on November 15, 2023.
Source: Allocine
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
