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| Gentle Monster Photo: Film i Väst |
Marie Kreutzer explores the fallout from discovering a partner is facing prosecution for downloading and sharing child abuse images in Gentle Monster. The world of Lucy (Léa Seydoux) seems normal and loving, with her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) and their young son Johnny (Malo Banchett) but when the police, led by Elsa (Jella Haase), coming knocking in the door one day and confiscate Philip’s electrical equipment and hard drives, Lucy’s world begins to implode. The film – Kreutzer’s follow-up to Corsage – premièred in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Kreutzer, along with Seydoux, Rupp, Haase and Catherine Deneuve (who plays Lucy’s mother) took questions at a press conference.
Kreutzer revealed that she only finished the film a week ago and added it was "like winning the lottery being here".
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| Léa Seydoux on the red carpet Photo: Festival de Cannes |
On the origins of the film and choosing to take the point of view of Lucy from the start, she said: “It was a very trivial start. I read a newspaper article in Die Zeit about a big paedophile ring in Germany who had been discovered and then prosecuted and it was a very explicit article and very hard to read – I read it over two days. When I finished it, I was at a swimming pool with my daughter and stepdaughters and when I walked through the area I couldn't look at the families in the same way I'd looked at them the day before.
“I obviously knew about sexual violence towards children but I was not so aware that I do not only know victims, I must know perpetrators as well. And this is really where it started. I just felt helpless after reading it and I felt the only thing I could do as a filmmaker and as a storyteller was to make a film about it.”
Expanding on her approach to writing the characters, she added: “I once read that ‘intelligence means accepting ambivalence’ and I think what’s always important for me in my storytelling is that each character is the hero of their own story. So this was my approach to the characters, even the perpetrator.
“I didn’t want to go into his perspective, I didn’t want to explain what he’s doing and why he is doing it. This was a story about how society and how people who love someone who did this deal with it. I learned so much from the research and the word I heard most was ‘shame’. I could feel that everywhere we went with the project that people were shying away. It doesn’t give you an answer to the problem, the idea of the film is to ask us, as a society, questions.”
The character of Lucy becomes isolated as a result of her husband’s actions, feeling unable to talk to anybody about what has happened as she grapples with whether to believe his explanation or not. Her only real emotional outlet is through her character’s job as an experimental musician, so that she pours what she is feeling into her work.
Seydoux said: “It's the first time I've sung in a film and I was very happy to do so. The singer Camille[who provides the score] is someone who I greatly like. So I was very happy. When I was a child, singing was my main mode of expression, it's the way I communicated with the world. I was a very shy little girl. And when I was a teenager I stopped singing because I had become too shy but singing gives you a direct access to emotion and that's perhaps the reason why you feel so vulnerable when you're singing. I love that Lucy uses singing to convey what she's thinking and to cope with the way her world crumbles and explodes. A world in which she is a victim, singing is a form of release. That's how I understood the character as a spectator.”
She adds: “Lucy goes through different states of emotion at the same time as the spectator. You're totally with her, you feel total empathy and you discover the film through her. I don't think I made things over-intellectual in terms of portraying the character and what happens to her. I tried to be in the moment and in a state of total empathy.”
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| Marie Kreutzer on the red carpet Photo: Festival de Cannes |
Deneuve has a smaller supporting role in the film but says they can often be as interesting as lead parts.
She added: "I didn't really need to prepare my part all that much. My character isn't very present in the film but I do represent a pillar for my daughter. I think that when she leaves she goes to see her mother and her mother does what she can to help her. For me, therefore, as a mother, it was quite obvious."
Rupp, arguably, also has a tricky challenge on his hands, since he has to find the beating heart of Philip. He said: “First of all the biggest issue was getting to like him in a way, finding an emotional bridge to him. I was scared if I didn't like him I wouldn't be able to play him so I had to find this love for him. Also, in Gentle Monster, I never played the monster part, it was just the gentle part.”
The film unfolds in three languages, since Lucy is French, Philip is German but English is often used as the mode of communication in th house.
Seydoux said: ”I speak several languages in the film and it was very interesting for me. I think it tells you a lot about the character and her isolation. It was very interesting, the fact that she is a foreigner. If I can talk about my own experience, I love to work with directors from foreign countries because I like to be displaced, in a way. I just love to meet new cultures. With experience, now, I realise that cinema is a common language and universal. I was extremely happy to work with Marie on this film. She asked me to learn German, which was difficult for me because I don't speak German, so I had to work to learn it phonetically. It made complete sense for the character and all she's going through, all the pain. When I read the script for the first time, I read it very fast. I was completely drawn in by the story. I felt complete empathy for the character. I think I know Lucy and I understand her loneliness.”
And as for crying on cue, Seydoux added: “In fact, I often wonder when I see actors who cry in the cinema how they do it. When the script is well written and when the scene is very moving, I'm moved myself and I think that we actors exist as a vector for emotion. We convey emotion – this is something I like to do. I like to move people. When it comes to crying, I don't think about it. I don't say to myself, 'I have to cry now' when I'm acting, I just try to be free there. I don't try to look at myself acting.”
