Half a century ago, after co-writing her first screenplay, Coline Serreau swore that she would henceforth work alone.
She kept her word.
She produced and directed each of her films, paying attention to every detail, from writing the synopsis to the final details of the final edit.
She continues on this path since it is in a
“only on stage”
that she chose to tell, at the Michel theater, the great moments of a career which began at 10 years old, when Jean-Marie Serreau, her father , director of contemporary works, gave him his first audition.
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After taking musicology and trapeze lessons at Annie Fratellini's circus school, she decided to become an actress, then embarked on the adventure of the big screen.
The consecration came ten years later, with
Three Men and a Bassinet.
In addition to more than 12 million admissions in France and adaptations in the United States, there were three Césars.
She still keeps in a corner of her memory today, the refusals of all the actors to whom she offered the three main roles.
“In their eyes, taking care of a baby in front of cameras was bad for their image, because the female public would no longer consider them in the same way
,” she recalls.
This triumph, which no one expected, did not surprise him.
An attentive observer of our society, she was convinced that it corresponded to the spirit of the times.
She concedes, on the other hand, that she was 15 years ahead when she made
La Belle Verte"
, where, through the arrival of an extraterrestrial on our planet, she evokes the necessity of ecology and predicts the decline of our society.
Admissions then slightly exceeded a million, but an internet release then enjoyed such great popularity that a new generation considers it a cult film.
A scene from
La Crise
, produced in 1992, which Maria Pacôme concludes by exclaiming
“I don’t care about your problems!”
»
has also become a classic.
Coline Serreau no longer counts the women who, one day or another, recited this monologue to her by heart.
For this feminist, these sentences touched the hearts of her peers because they go against a form of patriarchy which no longer has its place in our society.
“As the years pass, unlike men who tend to let their guard down, female sexuality becomes more and more flourishing with age, and this until the end.
They must enjoy this happiness.”
She discusses this subject and many others in
La Belle Histoire de Coline Serreau
, a show with a resolutely humorous tone, whose text evolves with each performance.
Memories that come back to him are transformed into moments of improvisation.
She recounts, among other things, her first writings, starting with a serial at 20 cents per page, her play
Lapin, Lapin,
created in 1986, still regularly shown in several countries,
Quisantout and Grosbêta
, awarded five Molièrers, and the Delta Choir, made up of amateurs that she regularly conducts in the south of France.
She smiles when talking about the bronca caused at the Opéra Bastille by including hip-hop in a production.
She is delighted by working on the dialogues of her next film, where she intends to single out, in her own way, the eco-machos and denounce the flaws of subsidized shows.
Eternally passionate about images in all their forms, she decided to reveal her secret garden by exhibiting for the first time, in Paris, at the Galerie Cinéma, photographs, drawings and watercolors inspired by the world around her.
She finally finds the time to go, on Wednesdays, to the meetings of the Academy of Fine Arts where she was admitted in 2019. At 76 years old, she estimates that she has at least ten years of creation ahead of her, before thinking of his posterity.
La Belle Histoire by Coline Serreau,
at the Théâtre Michel, Monday at 8 p.m., from 23 to 35 euros.
Coline Serreau exhibition
at the Galerie Cinéma, 26, rue Saint-Claude, Paris IIIe.