Mum's the word for Camille Cottin

Camille Cottin on the red carpet at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: 'Children find it awkward to express what they feel and everything is coded' Photo: Film Servis Karlovy Vary

As a mother of two children (son Léon Gabriel and daughter Anna Paloma) Call My Agent star Camille Cottin concedes that she’s “struggling at times” to combine professional and domestic life.

In Out of Love (Les enfants vont bien), her second collaboration with director Nathan Ambrosioni, she plays Jeanne, a professional woman with no ambitions for a family whose younger sister Suzanne disappears and leaves behind her two young children.

Cottin admits there are pressures from society about being “a good mother”. She explained: “Parenthood and motherhood is considered as something natural as is absolute devotion and unconditional love … and it is not. It is interesting to have different versions of maternity and to have wider perspectives. Nathan is very obsessed with that question and to do with motherhood. After Toni [his previous film about a single mother of five] it gives a different angle. Finding the freedom and knowing yourself and losing yourself in motherhood is something that is strong in him.”

Director Nathan Ambrosioni and Camille Cottin take a bow at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Photo: Film Servis Karlovy Vary

In an encounter earlier today at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival she suggested that it is all very complex. “You have your own personality and your personality is not always adapted to the role you are meant to play. Of course you can reinvent it and have a different way of being a mum, but nevertheless it requires a deal of organisation and anticipation and rigour. Those are things that it is difficult to do without and sometimes when you find yourself lacking one of those things then it is difficult.

“Children find it awkward to express what they feel and everything is coded. We have to understand that and it all goes very fast. And then suddenly they are adults. And what you have given them you have given them and it is done and they have to make their own life.” Then with confessional laugh she adds: “Honestly I am struggling at times.”

This year she has only agreed to do films shot in the French capital like Out of Love. “It was great to have this conversation with Nathan and ask him if it was possible to film in Paris. It is not obviously Paris but an unidentified place in the suburbs which is the perfect setting for the story. It is sort of impersonal with all the houses looking the same. I told Nathan that I really needed to be home to be able to do my two jobs as a mum and an actress. He agreed and it all worked out.

“I joked with by boyfriend [architect Benjamin Mahon de Monaghan] who is the father of our children that it would be catastrophe if my nanny ever left me rather him. Joking aside he is a great and good dad and partner. ‘My wifie’ is what I call him.”

At 46 she underlines her appreciation of her relationship with Ambrosioni. “It is so precious for him to write with me in mind. He is only 25 and it is hard to imagine what kind of film he might be doing when he is 40. It is very exciting to be an active participant in his journey as a director. You can feel he had a need to tell this story so it was more the whole DNA of the film that attracted me rather than simply the character,” she says.

Family drama and trauma - Camille Cottin and Monia Chokri in Out Of Love by Nathan Ambrosioni Photo: Film Servis KVIFF

She found it fascinating to play someone who never shares what she feels. “The children are being confronted with a situation that is so tragic and so difficult to handle for people of their age. She cannot talk to them as if they are innocent which they are not. They know what is happening and they have to deal with it. She would rather say nothing than talk bullshit.”

Ambrosioni, she senses, likes her style. “I am more expressive with my eyes. I do not always say what I feel. But if you look in my eyes you can read it and that is why Nathan wrote it in the way he did because he could imagine me expressing things with my eyes that I was not saying.”

She admits that working with children can be quite stressful. “You have to protect them. The audience has to believe it but the children themselves should not be upset. In the beginning I kept a distance from them and I think It was not nice for them. The young boy felt intimidated and then he told Nathan. When I started being more mothering and more me it helped a lot. But at the beginning I thought maintaining that distance would help them but, no, it was not a good thing to do.

“I could identify with the feeling of being trapped and the anger. She had no freedom of choice. The most challenging thing was to feel that anxiety and at the same time but to keep it away from the children. The scene where she collapses in floods of tears was also good for me to let go.”

Cottin who rarely takes a break, has films coming up by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache (Just An Illusion); Pierre Schoeller (Rembrandt) and Tamara Stephanyan (Sauver Les Morts). She will also play the evil innkeeper in Fred Cavayé’s adaptation of Les Miserables opposite Benjamin Lavernhe.

When asked the obligatory sign-off question about the return of top agent Andréa Martel in a final flurry of Call My Agent she says: “There is a strong possibility.” Nudge-nudge and wink-wink understood.