It was the first thing she said, after the usual hellos.
Laure Calamy would like to have our phone number.
Because after the interviews, she often wants to call back the journalists.
To specify a word, develop a sketched subject.
The perfection of a theater scene repeated a thousand times, of an eighteenth film take, she would like to transpose them into life.
Without this taking away from his legendary spontaneity, on the contrary.
It is this requirement, this permanent intranquillity, which allows him to heckle certainties, to be drunk without alcohol, modest without clothes, funny in despair or bitter in joy, and to climb the steps of Cannes while dancing the french cancan.
In video,
Annie Colère
with Laure Calamy, the trailer
At 47, with three films in which she is top of the bill (in theaters in the coming months), Laure Calamy is the whirlwind of freedom that French cinema has been waiting for.
A sudden hurricane, after twenty years of relative anonymity on the boards of the public theater, triggered by the explosion of the series
Ten percent
, in 2015. She has since made twenty-five films in seven years, won very beautiful first roles and a César for best actress for
Antoinette in the Cévennes
, in 2021. And kept this freshness which makes her tumble to the rendezvous by bike, turquoise helmet on her head and dapper red coat.
Annie Colère,
a committed film
The bike is also red, authentic 1970s model, chrome fenders and old springs under the cracked leather of the saddle.
It is the one she rides in the film
Annie Colère
, by Blandine Lenoir .
A role written for her, which sticks to her skin so much that it seems logical that she kept the bike.
The story takes place in 1974. Annie, a worker in a mattress factory, married, mother of two children, meets activists from Mlac, the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception.
“My mother told me about this time, her youth, says the actress.
We do not measure to what extent clandestine abortions were then part of women's lives.
With the risks involved.
Five thousand women died from it each year.
Mlac committees practiced safe and painless abortions, claimed it despite the illegality.
They put considerable pressure: without them, the Veil law legalizing abortion would never have been passed.
To read alsoAudrey Diwan, director of
L'Événement
: "The story of Annie Ernaux speaks of violence, loneliness, but also of desire, enjoyment and freedom"
“My mother, a class defector”
In Laure Calamy's enthusiasm to defend the film, there is her own feminist commitment, which has always been affirmed, the vigilance awakened by American regression, "the way in which even in France, the right to abortion is called into question in a sneaky way, with doctors who invoke the conscience clause, the closure of maternity wards”.
There is also an autobiographical echo “with the journey of my mother, class defector”, daughter of small peasants from Béarn who became a nurse and then a psychologist when she resumed her studies at the age of 30.
There is also, finally, the enjoyment of playing a course that nothing predestines.
“It's a joyful, luminous film.
Annie, this woman from a modest background, who is in life as she was told to do – you are going to have kids, work hard, listen to your father then your husband –,
suddenly allows itself to think for itself.
Thanks to the others, by confronting these women of all social origins, she walks towards places of which she did not suspect the existence.
Beautiful but not unreal
This reversal of fate, this
feminine
empowerment , Laure Calamy embodies them.
She is the proof that one can begin a career of leading roles in cinema after 40 years, that one can embody brilliance and beauty beyond the narrow standards of cinematography.
“She is one of those actresses who have made it possible to project something else on women, says her director friend Léna Bréban.
Represent desirable women, with whom the spectators can identify.
"She's beautiful, but she's not unreal," adds filmmaker Blandine Lenoir.
And she assumes her body happily.
She is an ordinary little woman, who is in fact extraordinary.”
Full screen
"She's an ordinary little woman, who is in fact extraordinary," says filmmaker Blandine Lenoir of her.
Luc Braquet
She was an overwhelmed mother in
Ava,
by Léa Mysius (her first César nomination), an Amazon warehouse employee in
Nos Batailles
, by Guillaume Senez, a farmer's wife in
Only Beasts,
by Dominik Moll, before to burst the screen in three stunning first roles: the teacher in love with
Antoinette in the Cévennes
, by Caroline Vignal, the prostitute who fights to pay for her son's studies in
Une femme du monde,
by Cécile Ducrocq, the chambermaid in a Parisian palace in
À plein temps
, by Éric Gravel.
In video,
Our battles
, the trailer
Through these characters there is a certain model, that of a woman of the people whose courage or quest can only provoke the empathy of the spectator, a feeling that, visibly, she also inspires in the directors.
However, in the
Origin of Evil
, by Sébastien Marnier, where she again toils at the bottom of the social chain, in a fish cannery, she is delighted to arouse a more ambivalent disturbance.
free talent
“I don't want any morals in my characters.
We all have in us the beautiful as well as the ugly.
I'm not interested in judging, but trying to understand.
To say to yourself, at the start, this person was a child.
She quotes Michel Serrault playing the criminal Doctor Petiot, seems to dream of a comparable adventure, defends the association of tragedy and humor, as with her mentor in the theater, the playwright and director Olivier Py.
“A so-called funny situation often starts with heartbreaking things.
A fall, a failure.
The human being is grotesque and touching.
It's true that sometimes, the more I have the opportunity to be ridiculous or to be “too much”, the more I like it.
We recommend his crescendo of paranoid, jubilant fury in
Rag Boy
, the first film by comedian Nicolas Maury.
“We have this common point of rubbing shoulders with abysses, says the actor, his comic alter ego in the series
Ten percent
.
And to play with our anxieties.
On video,
Rag boy
, the trailer
The power of words
She confirms.
Says that certain situations for others that are mundane, such as the promotional exercise on television, can throw her into turmoil.
“I know how to deploy a speech, to be inspired, fortunately.
But I can also block myself, lose my words, my wits, and… be paralyzed.
It is very painful.
There was a year of my life, in college, when I barely spoke anymore…” She is silent.
Laughs suddenly, as if to regain his momentum.
“In short, it's true that in the vocation of an actor, there is always the desire to be watched.
But there are also words.
I found it wonderful to embody texts, things that are said, precisely, not like in life.
Whether it's Claudel, Marivaux, Feydeau, suddenly, as in the tale,
these are no longer toads coming out of your mouth but jewels.
It saved me from something.
Of the anguish in which one can be, adolescent, in the face of existence.
There was a year of my life, in college, when I barely spoke anymore...
Laura Calamy
A daredevil and "probably tiring" little girl, she liked to climb trees and run barefoot in the orchards around the residential housing estate where she grew up, near Orléans.
Her friend Léna Bréban, a student with her in high school, remembers a less exuberant teenager, “smoky make-up like The Cure, with that slightly off look that we give ourselves at this age”.
The only child of parents who made themselves alone, Laure Calamy descends from lineages for whom life was not kind.
On the paternal side, the grandfather, a country doctor, died at the age of 42, leaving his wife with five children.
His father, who would also become a doctor, grew up in boarding school.
On the maternal side, there is the “mythical” story, she laughs, of the twenty-one pregnancies of her great-grandmother.
“She spent almost twenty years of her life pregnant.
It was in the peasant environment,
The meeting with Olivier Py
At home, young Laure hears her parents talking to each other about care and patients - "but never with names, they were very respectful of medical secrecy".
His father was in charge of the infectiology department at La Source hospital in Orléans at the time of the AIDS epidemic.
His mother, a psychologist, works with him “for the sick, but also for caregivers”.
“There were too many things to take in, the death of young people, eaten away slowly.”
She left for Paris at 18 with the intention of becoming an actress, a vocation interviewed as a child – “a theater class, I had only been there once, but I liked it so much… I was happy” – confirmed at the Festival d'Avignon in front of
La Servante
, by Olivier Py - “some people don't like its excessiveness, me, on the contrary, that's what made me decide to do this job”.
A stage beast
She reunited with the director in the last year of her studies at the Paris Conservatoire, cut her teeth in the theater for young audiences, storming community halls with Léna Bréban.
“You had to see her, says the latter, facing six hundred kids who were screaming with laughter, subjugated.
She held them all, she took them very far.
He's a showman."
In the play
Les Inséparables
, created by Léna Bréban, Calamy plays a little boy.
During meetings with the public, at the edge of the set, she takes off her wig, becomes a woman again, enjoys the disappointment or, on the contrary, the joy provoked.
“To act is to be beyond genres.
It's not our sex that defines us, we have to stop being characterized by that.
We are so much more interesting elsewhere.”
To play is to be beyond genres.
It's not our gender that defines us
Laura Calamy
A companion, mountain guide
When she was younger, she “dragged like a man, with the freedom only allowed to men”.
"It's my tranny side," she laughs, quoting her favorite book,
Orlando
, by Virginia Woolf, the story of a young nobleman who wakes up in a female body and learns about a social condition. much more constrained.
Today, she joins as soon as she can her companion, a mountain guide, in his mazet in the Cévennes, where they live without water or electricity.
She has no children, and would also like this injunction to women to stop, even if she adores those of others and particularly her son-in-law and her godson.
“Children, when you're with them, it's a bubble, a shot of playfulness, of present time.
Where you forget precisely that the ideal,
Two other films will be released in early 2023,
Les Cyclades,
by Marc Fitoussi, and
Good Conduct,
by Jonathan Barré, before
Iris and the Men
, by Caroline Vignal.
She takes up her metaphor of the bubble to talk about the shootings she goes on, cheerful to take advantage of the enthusiasm she arouses.
“There is this happy side of the collective, like going on tour with a band.
We are in this world that we all create together.
Life, only better.