First reportbetween sordid murder and the discovery of pleasure
With First report, in theaters from April 24, director Victoria Musiedlak stages a drama with multiple lines with rigor and intensity. Social commentary, legal thriller, romantic story and even erotic drama, First report It thus successfully exploits various cinemas to tell the initiatory journey of Nora, a young lawyer who finds herself dealing with her first criminal case. And last but not least: a sordid murder.
This “first case” for Nora is not limited to the purely legal aspect. Working to defend the main suspect, she will indeed collide with a world she does not know, both external and internal, and will have encounters that will upset her ideas and her reality.
A great performance for Noée Abita
Noée Abita, fantastic as Nora, paints a very concrete portrait as she embodies with fascinating confusion the sensations of lost innocence and virginity. She brings so inside First report the association of a social and legal chronicle with an intimate, loving and sensual portrait. Indeed, his relationship with Alexis (Anders Danielsen Lie), the older and more experienced police officer in charge of the murder, will plunge him into new and tumultuous waters. Having met the director at the Angoulême Film Festival 2023, the actress explained to us:
“It was interesting for me, because it was the first time I had been offered a role as a young woman, and this one specifically. She is a young woman but she delights in certain childishness. Which is kind of suffocating, because she revels in this comfort, it’s reassuring. The studies, then the work, everything is well structured and organised. And when her boss releases her, despite herself, a breach opens. She excites him and scares him at the same time. In her work as in her family, all the cards are shuffled. She opens her eyes to things that were hidden from her.“
“I’m going to the heart of the matter to desecrate”
This film of “first times” therefore contains very intimate sequences, scenes of awakening desire and discovery of pleasure that Victoria Musiedlak has staged with attention and rigor:
“I have a point of view on sex and desire sequences that is very technical. I don’t film reality. Actors are actors, we talk about it a lot together, very precisely about intentions, about putting things into words, even about words in caresses. I go to the heart of the matter to desecrate it.
It worked very well, I think it reassures the actors, they know where they’re going. I don’t let him… like Kechiche for example – who I adore, his sequences are brilliant -, who shoots for hours, reshoots fifteen times… For me he is very prepared, in advance and on set, everything is very clear about what they need to do and what is expected.“
The director, in addition to underlining the “pressure” she exerted on herself to stage the foster care sequences, remaining well within the character’s point of view and spending a lot of time with her director of photography during editing, also recalls that a central scene of the film, the one in which Nora finds Alexis in her car, was the most difficult to shoot.
It was a very important sequence, I wanted it to be sensual, that there was this discovery of the character’s pleasure. There’s no dialogue, it’s a scene you really have to embody. We needed time, for the actors to lend themselves to the game, for the chemistry to take hold and for us to get to that point! Lots of drama, and it was raining, it must have been -5°C. It was cold, we slipped, we fell… (laughs)
Source: Cine Serie
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