Leave the nighttowards another tomorrow
After his short film A sistermultiple award-winning and nominated for the 2020 Oscar for best fiction short film, Belgian director Delphine Gérard has made her first feature film, Leave the night, which is its continuation. The story ofA sister it was the terrifying story of a young woman who had been sexually assaulted and who, in her attacker’s car, called the police under the pretense of calling her sister. 16 minutes of unbreathable tension, brilliantly written and directed.
4 years later, Delphine Girard has thus decided, with her same three characters, to leave this night, together, exploring the consequences, showing the next day with her judicial proceedings, her words to say what has just happened, this awareness to be gained by the victim, the attacker and the police officer who responded to the call.
Leave the night it’s brilliant and, for a first feature, demonstrates remarkable maturity and cinematic know-how. But he also benefits from a different, still new perspective, which shifts his gaze towards the attacker. In a way close to that of Xavier Legrand (Until the end, The successor), and if the film reserves the same treatment to the points of view of the three characters, it is in fact on the aggressor that the interest is concentrated, that the solution is suggested.
Indeed, in other words, Leave the night does not play the easy and petty game of victim voyeurism, where the victim is required to make the effort, to maintain her complaint, to explain, justify and prove on her own what happened to her. Here it is up to the attacker to explain himself, he is the one who is asked to “know”, to say “why” it happened. More than the freshness of this speech, what emerges from the film above all is its necessity, that it is up to those responsible and those guilty to rightly give an account of it.
Meeting with Delphine Girard
How did you come to this feature film? Leave the night ? It was conceived quickly afterwards A sister ?
Delfina Girard : It wasn’t expected and it wasn’t immediate. It was progressive. When we presented the short film, A sister, I felt that something had not been completely closed for me. The characters left a strong impression on me and I observed in the spectators how her spectacular appearance acted. I think I’m interested in the after, the question “what do we do next?”. I felt that, above all, curiosity and the desire to explore took over. So I started researching the legal system. What would we offer these three characters?
Delfina Girard : The short film was based on a news story that happened in the United States. I had read the articles about the trial for this story, and the young woman who had called from the car had not gone to the trial. So I asked myself why she had the courage to make this call, and then never let her voice be heard again. What had happened between these two moments?
The opening of Leave the night, the first quarter of an hour, is your short film. It’s not common.
Delfina Girard : It was the somewhat strange bet I made. Tell myself, as soon as I write, that this would be the beginning. It is also linked to what I observed during the screenings of the short film. An emotion related to tension, and I wanted to do something with this emotion. Follow him. We simply returned the sequences in the file call center, the ones in the car are the ones from the short film. But they are exactly the same shots, it was above all a question of sets and costumes.
What drove me was the desire to follow what the characters were going through. In life it happens that we experience a night that resembles a thriller and then, the next day, it is a different kind of everyday life. But who was it contaminated last night?
It takes the form of a drama, underpinned by the question of resolving what the thriller has produced. I didn’t want to remain in the tension of that night, but to return to the banality of everyday life that clashes with what happened. I wanted to see behind the scenes of these procedures. How do you pick up your child in such a situation, how do you go back to work, how do you talk to your mother…
The main cast is the same as. short film. How did you work with these three actors this “after”?
Delfina Girard : I worked differently with the three actors. With Selma Alaoui, who plays Aly, we worked a lot on the containment of emotions. I didn’t want her to give up. I told him, “the emotion is underneath, but you swallow it, you don’t want it to come“However, we had to know what this emotion was. So how to work in these states where she refuses to fall into the cliché of the victim. She doesn’t want to be alienated from what the legal procedure requires.
For the character of Dari, played by Guillaume Duhesme, we worked on confusion. What interests me about this character is to what extent is he aware of what he has done, or not done, what would it take for him to lift the veil?
Every time we worked on it with Guillaume, we saw this gray area around him, this fact of wanting to tell something different from what had happened. It was therefore a work on confusion, on lies and on the ability of human beings to tell themselves another story when the one about them compares too much to them.
For Anna (Veerle Baetens), it was the idea of being involved without really understanding, with an invisible force that pushed her to be part of this story. She is a woman who has a lot of control but she is a mask, underneath she is very fragile. So how to show it, with small signs.
We follow your three characters with equal points of view, but we nevertheless understand that if one character in particular has to work towards resolution, it’s Dari.
Delfina Girard : For everyone, it was about showing the path to take as the story progresses. Aly’s character still feels guilty, and Dari doesn’t. There is a reversal of guilt, which happens very often in these stories. It was interesting for Dari to find out what would lead him to question himself. Maybe eventually he will move in this direction, but it is not yet enough, the road is still long. But I didn’t know, before we got to these final sequences, what the dialogue would be. On reflection, for me, it was the only place we could get to. And I think we’re all stuck there.
In Leave the nightit’s not a story of badly managed desire, far from it, it’s something else”put the other lower than I feel at the time“. This is, “I’m not where I want, I thought it would be something brilliant and it’s not, I don’t want you to feel good and I don’t, I don’t want you to laugh when I’m not laughing.” This issue of frustration, and the management of this emotion, is where I see things, spaces to be gained.
Is this the night we have to leave?
Delfina Girard : I found this title beautiful for the three characters. More generally, I also think that we have a very long night ahead of us and that we want the dawn to come. Let’s move on to what we will do, together. I wanted to stop by in the morning. There is this idea of “leaving the night” all together, and thinking about what we are doing as a society, what we are rebuilding.
Sometimes I get hopeful and then I hear things that… What I find sad is to see that we still don’t all agree on the benefits of moving forward. This violence, if we do not all agree on the interest in overcoming it, which we all must derive from it, is complicated. I have the impression, perhaps more so in Europe, that reactions of surprise persist. “Oh good?”, “Oh yes?”… As in the case of Judith Godrèche, it is as if we were constantly starting from scratch.
Source: Cine Serie
Ray Ortiz is a journalist at Gossipify, known for his coverage of trending news and current events. He is committed to providing readers with accurate and unbiased reporting, and is respected for his ability to keep readers informed on the latest news and issues.
