The Hotel Regina, in Paris, suits him like a glove.
Its corridors of celadon ceramics, its bar, its
revolving doors
(revolving doors) and its carts full of luggage suit Fanny Ardant's traveling mood.
She nibbles on hazelnuts, speaks in long sentences that she punctuates with ample hand gestures, interspersed with whispers, familiar terms, and punctuated by silences.
Her leitmotiv is the fear of finding herself "stuck" in a style, in an environment, in a house, in the life of a mother.
This is undoubtedly the reason why she admirably interprets the role of Shauna, a septuagenarian in love with a quadra in Carine Tardieu's film,
Les Jeunes Amants.
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In video, "Les Jeunes Amants", the trailer
Miss Figaro.
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For four decades you have embodied, through your artistic choices and your positions, a form of uncompromising freedom.
Is this role part of this desire to upset the codes of society?
Fanny Ardent.
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No.
I don't see how an older woman falling in love with a younger man would be a revolutionary act.
It has existed since the dawn of time.
Oedipus did marry his mother, Jocasta, with whom he had a daughter, Antigone!
It was because he liked her.
It's not at all to shock that I agreed to play the role of Shauna, this 70-year-old woman who falls in love with Pierre, a 45-year-old man.
I always thought that diktats prevented great passions
So what interested you in this film?
It's the love story. Simply. I am obsessed with love. Love received, love expected, love given. The film's script declines love in all its forms, the love I feel for my daughter and the love she has for me. The one that Pierre offers me and that he also lavishes on his patients. That of Pierre's wife for her husband, whom she does not understand. When he tells her that he had a relationship with Shauna, she bursts out laughing. "But she's old," she said, dumbfounded. Yes, she is old, but she pleases him beyond any consideration of logic, aesthetics, morality. I have always thought that diktats prevent great passions.
What is passion for you?
It's dazzling, urgent, absolute necessity.
It is an impulse, like the mystical life, from which no one, and especially not reason, can turn you away.
But if I meet a couple who have loved each other since day one, with no arrangement, then I kneel before them.
And when are you cheated?
I want to die.
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant with François Truffaut in 1980. She will be the filmmaker's last companion.
Photo Gamma
Fanny Ardant's photo album
In 1984, on the set of
Next Summer
, by Nadine Trintignant.
Photo Gamma
Fanny Ardant's photo album
In 1988, the actress turns for Tony Gatlif in
Cry not my love
.
Photo Gamma
Fanny Ardant's photo album
She is also a great theater actress, as here in
Master Class - The Singing Lesson
, by Terrence McNally, directed by Roman Polanski in 1996.
Photo Gamma
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
Fanny Ardant's photo album
See the slideshow
15 pictures
This happened to you?
Yes.
The curtain of the Temple is torn.
It's as if you were badly burned.
But experience is useless.
You start over.
There is a sentence in
One does not trifle with love:
“I suffered, but I loved.
It's me who lived…” That's why Carine's subject appealed to me.
And this phrase from Pasolini that I really like: "You have to burn to arrive consumed at the last fire."
Still remains the question of bodies and skins?
The way the bodies are filmed is simply sublime.
The director was not afraid to film the flesh with realism.
Carine didn't want the light to protect me.
I let her put her vision of history as she saw fit and film this architect who has partly retired to the countryside.
I like that she took this side of brutality and not that of aesthetics.
Everything is wanted.
The old nightgowns I wear, the shapeless sweaters, the skirts that are too long.
We rarely film old age, especially in a woman in love, with such realism.
Usually, the bodies are sublimated.
Of course Shauna is afraid to show her weathered body.
And you, were you afraid?
I felt a delight in being this object of repulsion.
That's what I am, a good old woman with an old nightgown.
Basically, it sheds even more light on the quality of my lover, who is a real man who loves a woman who does not wallow in the clichés of beauty and youth, a woman who is not a magazine engraving, and this please me a lot.
We always think that love and the intoxication of love are only possible at 20 years old
And in life, does that scare you?
We always think that love and the intoxication of love are only possible at 20 years old.
And then nothing is possible.
But love stories aren't always sexual.
The most important thing is the attraction of being to being.
When, at the end of the film, I say to my lover: “Do you know that soon I will be in a little chair?”, he answers me: “Yes, I know but, in the meantime, we breathe the same air”.
He is the one who has the last word.
What do you like in these love stories without a future?
Precisely that they are without tomorrow.
It is absolute love.
I love these love stories that build nothing.
The great ambiguity is to believe that marriage is love.
Don't you find that we are witnessing a return of the couple?
Yes of course.
People are scared.
They want to put down roots.
They want their little house on the prairie.
Naturally, we live in an era of emptiness.
There are no more politicians since Che Guevara died.
There are no more ideals, no idealism.
More religion.
What's left?
The couple and the family, who protect against this aspiration of the void.
The Young Lovers,
by Carine Tardieu, with Fanny Ardant, Melvil Poupaud, Cécile de France.
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