PREMIO PESARO NUOVO CINEMA AD ARIELLE DOMBASLE

Valerio Carando

« La voix, les mouvements, les gestes, les regards, j’ai tout admiré dans votre création dans le spectacle de Kleist. […] Je voulais vous dire que vous êtes bien, très bien, quelqu’un de rare et de beau »
François Truffaut, 1979

Actress, film director, screenwriter. In a word, a film-maker. Arielle Dombasle, with her ethereal, charismatic presence, has traversed – and left a deep mark on – some of the most compelling ‘film-happenings’ by Éric Rohmer (Perceval le Gallois, 1978; Catherine de Heilbronn, 1980; A Good Marriage, 1982; Pauline at the Beach, 1983; The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, 1993), Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Beautiful Prisoner, 1983; Un bruit qui rend fou, 1995; It’s Gradiva Who Is Calling You, 2006), Raúl Ruiz (Fado, Major and Minor, 1993; Promenade, 1995; Three Lives and Only One Death, 1995; Time Regained, 1998; Savage Souls, 2001), and Chris Marker (Junkopia, 1981; Sans Soleil, 1982; Tokyo Days, 1988), to mention just a bunch of masters who have devoted their vital and varied paths of research to the practices of the ‘new cinema.’ As an actress, she has worked over the years with several outstanding figures of French and international cinema, getting along with directors whose careers have been turbulent but prolific: Alexandre Astruc (Louis XI ou le Pouvoir central, 1979), Roman Polanski (Tess, 1979), Shūji Terayama (Fruits of Passion, 1981), José Giovanni (Une robe noire pour un tueur, 1981), Olivier Assayas (Laissé inachevé à Tokyo, 1982), José Luis Guerín (Berta’s Motives, 1984), Guy Hamilton (Try This One for Size, 1989), Fernando Trueba (Twisted Obsession, 1989), Daniel Schmid (Off Season, 1992), Peter Handke (The Absence, 1992), Agnès Varda (One Hundred and One Nights, 1995), Cédric Kahn (Boredom, 1998), Philippe de Broca (Amazon, 2000), John Malkovich (Hideous Man, 2002), Werner Schroeter (Deux, 2002), Claude Lelouch (Les Parisiens, 2004; Le Courage d’aimer, 2005), Michel Houellebecq (La Possibilité d’une île, 2008), Amos Gitai (Roses à crédit, 2010), and Volker Schlöndorff (Calm at Sea, 2011). As a director, and often screenwriter, she helmed a fairly good set of crazy, unruly, and highly personal films: it’s also difficult to match them to the universe of other film-makers of her generation, even if only in terms of summary external correspondences. Among her titles, Chassé-croisé (1982), a poetic digression on the archetypes of intrigue and mystery – those cherished by the creators of the Nouvelle Vague and some of their most illustrious successors, from Rivette to Robbe-Grillet – mediated by a kind of sensitivity that owes much to Cocteau; Les Pyramides Bleues (1988), a delirious experiment in modern melodrama set in Mexico, which enters into a productive dialogue from a distance with the hallucinatory fantasies of Roberto Gavaldón, Emilio Fernández, and Alberto Gout (although two directors who seem alien to such visceral, overflowing tensions, are credited as “artistic advisors:” no less than Rohmer and Marker); Opium (2012), a cinematic phantasmagoria centred on the liaison between Cocteau and Radiguet, departing from some writings penned by Cocteau himself; Alien Crystal Palace (2018), a psychedelic, overtly ‘punk’ take on the platonic myth of the androgynous – sort of Godardian Alphaville revisited in digital by the drunken ghost of Jesús Franco. Finally, Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan (2023), a Baroque rewriting of Balzac’s classic with the same title that tackles the visual affectations typical of high definition, with subtle irony and remarkable meta-discursive transparency: the result is an irresistible parody of the period TV series our aunts are so fond of – a ronde about the eternal recital of sentiments with an Ophüls twist, or a self-referential essay which reverses Rohmer’s most exemplary ethical cornerstones with unforgiving radicality. If Pauline at the Beach was a film about the self-deception triggered by amorous passion and, by extension, the irrepressible truths concealed behind all simulations (“acting” above all), then Les secrets de la princesse de Cadignan sanctions the definitive impossibility, in this Netflix era in full swing (in light of the irrevocable protagonism conquered by AI in producing a new audio-visual hegemony), of capturing even a remote residue of truth, authenticity, in the play of fiction. An intricate narrative device of Russian dolls in which all significant elements – not least Dombasle’s own performance, everything but mimetic – seem to want to succumb to the deception perpetrated by fiction, by acting. An anti-Rohmer; the cruel, meticulous chronicle of a parricidal gesture – it doesn’t get any more contemporary.

François Truffaut comment on Arielle Dombasle’s performance in Heinrich von Kleist’s Catherine de Heilbronn directed by Éric Rohmer at the Nanterre Théâtre des Amandiers and filmed for Antenne 2; in Victor Hache, Arielle Dombasle, Éditions du collectionneur, Paris, 2002, p. 142.

soggetto: Jacques Fieschi
adattato da: Honoré de Balzac
cinematografia: Éric Gautier
scenografia: Jacques Garcia
costumi: Vincent Darré
montaggio: Julia Gregory, Franck Nakache
suono: Jean-Paul Mugel, Nathalie Vidal, Claire Anne Largeron, Rosalie Revoyre
musica originale: Luc Rougy, Mike Theis, Gwen Navarro
cast: Arielle Dombasle, Julie Depardieu, Cédric Kahn, Michel Fau