Margaux Hartmann

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (OF DEATH AND LIGHT)

In Official Section Out of Competition, the Festival hosts the Spanish premiere of Margaux Hartmann

Margaux Hartmann is the story of a woman who resets her life after having lost her husband, a victim of a long illness. Its director, Ludovic Bergery, has presented this film which he explained as having its origin in the idea of "talking about a woman in her loneliness and in full vital reconstruction, after experiencing a tragedy". A mature character, but whose search to find herself "spans all ages, with doors opening and closing on her".

Bergery had as a reference for this story a series of female roles -both in movies and on TV- that, he said, have marked him since childhood. "I was very attracted to the figure of those women who appear in John Cassavetes' films, in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore [by Martin Scorsese]. There is a density and a sweetness in them that I wanted to bring to this film and to reflect it through a certain light. In this sense, the French filmmaker plays with a carefully crafted cinematography by Martin Roux: "The protagonist goes through many different and contrasting spaces, representing the loss of any reference. However, more than the setting, what is important is how she perceives and travels through her surroundings; this passage from winter to spring also shapes her intimate itinerary".

The embrace is Bergery's debut behind the scenes, but producer Frédéric Niedermayer (who this year is part of the international jury of the Official Section) saw in his project what matters most to him: "What interests me about cinema is that it has cinema, meaning staging. There was something very cinematographic in his writing and a really special sensitivity behind the fact that a man portrayed a 55-year-old woman in his first film". Producer of such renowned filmmakers as Emmanuel Mouret, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Jean Paul Civeyrac and Rebecca Zlotowski, he stated that he felt "more useful supporting a debutant than someone making his tenth film".

El abrazo

 

Emmanuelle Béart, one of the greatest interpreters of French cinema, who has received in this edition the City of Seville Award, embodies Margaux Hartmann, a character in search of lost time and who, in her newly acquired freedom, will live contradictory sensations and experiences, like herself. "At first I didn't have a specific actress in mind," said the film's director, "but I knew her a little earlier, and when I spoke with her about this project, it became clear that it had to be her. Emmanuelle worked in a very particular way, because she didn't want to read the script or have much background on Margaux. She built the character with her intuition, in the very process of shooting".

Bergery, who has an extensive previous career as an actor, also commented that "he wanted to work with other actors in an intimate way; not as a demonstration game, but with confidence and from the inside. I learned that from my acting experience: we bring our characters to life, and once we have them inside, we don't even need to act anymore".