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Interview: Arnaud Desplechin Discusses My Golden Days

The director spoke to us about his writing process, his fondness for Goodfellas, and more.

Interview: Arnaud Desplechin Discusses My Golden Days
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Over the course of 10 feature films (plus one documentary), Arnaud Desplechin has constructed a self-sustaining mythology of characters and scenarios that are in constant communication with one another, so that each new entry in the director’s oeuvre looks as much into the past as at the present moment. That’s certainly the case with My Golden Days, as Paul Dédalus (here played by both Quentin Dolmaire and Mathieu Amalric), the lead character from Desplechin’s 1996 film My Sex Life…or, How I Got Into an Argument, has been resurrected for a prequel of sorts. The film largely concerns Paul’s initial encounters with Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), whom Paul obsessed over in My Sex Life…, where she was played by Desplechin regular Emmanuelle Devos. In fact, Desplechin said in a recent interview that his latest film is constructed around Devos’s absence, and that “she had to be absent so that the film could exist.”

Thus, a certain ghostliness pervades My Golden Days, and not least because present-day Paul achingly longs to return to an irretrievable past where he could feel Esther’s warmth. But Desplechin’s cinema itself isn’t quite so bleak, what with its fast pace and use of vibrant colors, split-screens, and iris effects always drawing very vivid attention to its own construction. His cinema, too, is one of intertextuality. Attentive cinephiles may remember a character named Paul Dédalus in A Christmas Tale, but there he was a 16-year-old with seemingly no attachment to the Paul of the other two films. Is Paul an alter ego for Desplechin, much like Stephen Dedalus was for James Joyce or Antoine Doinel for François Truffaut? A counter question seems appropriate to that inquiry, namely: Would it matter?

Desplechin has said that audiences don’t need to see My Sex Life… in order to understand My Golden Days, but, well, of course they do, since the pleasure of Desplechin’s films comes, in part, from his interweaving of texts to find common threads. In my talk with the filmmaker, he spoke about such commonalities, the potential complementarity of slapstick and film noir, and why Martin Scorsese is so good with dialogue.

There’s a recurring motif in your films of characters falling down or talking about falling. In My Sex Life…, Paul tells his friends in an early scene that he wants to be “the master of his own fall.” And all of My Golden Days seems to be about Paul’s fear of potentially falling into the past, of being stuck there. And, of course, in A Christmas Tale, Amalric’s character quite literally falls face-first onto the sidewalk like a toppled domino. Is there greater significance to this metaphor for you?

Your question reminds me of a small story, and I will try to be brief. When I met Quentin [Dolmaire] and Lou [Roy-Lecollinet], the two of them were shy and they asked me in a very cautious way, “By the way, do we have to see My Sex Life…?” And I really begged them when I said, “Please, don’t look at the film. I want you to invent something new. I want you to speak for your own generation and not to speak for an old cinephile like me.” So they promised they wouldn’t do it. After that, I arrive on the set early in the morning to do the blocking alone without the actors. We have this scene where Paul is learning that his professor just died and that he lost her. And so, it was written in a very sparse way with just a few notes for the actors. So, when Quentin arrived I proposed to him, “At this point, you fall down on the floor. You faint.” Then, he looked at me with a smile and said, “By the way, I was wondering when my character would fall.” [laughs] And I said, “So I guess you saw My Sex Life…” And he said, “Yes, I lied. I saw it.” That’s one thing that interests me, when I can see a character falling—when he stops to be noble and suddenly he’s ridiculous. When he’s losing control of his own body, it’s like your discovering the character in his weakness. The fear of falling is quite interesting for me, just like in a slapstick movie, to see Charlie Chaplin falling on the ground, because when you’re more vulnerable, your body expresses a lot about yourself.

It’s interesting, too, because in the film you see the falling of the Berlin Wall on television, so that falling also attains a kind of historical significance.

Yeah, yeah, it’s also that. It’s a visual motif. You can see endlessly the wall falling, falling, falling, and the character will fall with the death of the teacher.

You mentioned falling with relation to slapstick, but the older Paul seems more like a classical male figure from film noir who is, in Paul’s own words, “tormented by the fear that I was never good enough for [Esther].” Do you see Paul this way, as being doomed by a past self?

I see it in an ambiguous way, because I think that, as you say, the character is doomed by his past, but I also think that the past is saving him. It’s something that we do in our own lives, and it’s that we’re losing our past. The memory disappears, and so we lose bits and pieces of our past and we’re not faithful to the young boys and girls we used to be. This is something that was terrifying but interesting to us. You have this brief scene where you can see Mathieu writing in his apartment and the voiceover says, “Now the boy is in Paris, he has a job, he’s happy, and everything is fine.” And I can see such loneliness in his character, and I think that his life is so dry. He paid the price to save his past. In that sense, just like the loneliness of the character coming from a film noir. What I admire about him is that he’s paying the price in order to save a few memories of Esther. And I think he’s brave to do that. I don’t know if I would be that brave. I think there’s something noble in that.

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That speaks to a core tension in the film, which seems to be Paul’s desire to be around others, but also the need to retreat and either be alone, or be surrounded by something completely new. In some ways, that also seems like an artist’s dilemma as well—whether to follow the pack or branch off.

I don’t know if I have a good memory about my own life, but I know that the films are a great step for me to try to save the past. It’s moving also, because a common experience you have as a filmmaker is that some actors you work with die, you know, a few years after you’ve worked together. You miss them, but in a way you save something of them, an image or something like that. It’s part of how cinema works: seeing ghosts on the screen. The beauty of it is that you’re saving something from the past.

Your screenplays outwardly project a fast-paced environment, but upon closer inspection, it’s apparent how tightly structured and written they are. I’m thinking of a pair of lines, specifically, after young Paul gets beaten up he says, “I felt nothing,” and when older Paul, reflecting on his past, says, “I feel nothing.” It seems you’re suggesting, through the continuity of lines, that as a teenager, identity is physical, but when you become an adult, it becomes more psychological. How does that transition resonate with you?

I like the idea that Paul is a skeptical character. He’s not sure in his life. Since his mother died, he’s insecure, even a little bit empty. So when he’s getting the shit beat out of him, he thinks, “I didn’t feel a thing. I can’t complain.” And so he needs Esther to arrive in his life to feel something at last. But before Esther, he didn’t feel a thing. He wasn’t on Earth. To put it another way: When Paul is writing to Esther he says, “You exist like a mountain.” Paul is a character who isn’t that sure he does exist, but he’s sure of one thing, and that’s that Esther does exist. And so now he can feel the pain with her. But before Esther, he was too shallow for that. He needed her in order to become a man. And what moves me, too, is that it’s not something that I planned. I guess I knew it and didn’t know it at the same time, but when I can see Quentin acting during the whole film, he’s this really young man, who is 19 years old, and is behaving like an old man, with an old manner. And then the older Paul, played by Mathieu, allows himself to become an adolescent and to say that everything hurts. It’s funny to see this character who’s saying, “I don’t feel a thing,” and when he becomes an old man, he can say at last: “I’m suffering.” And he can yell. And he can misbehave in the restaurant with Kovalki [Pierre Andrau]. At last he misbehaves. When he was younger, he was behaving like an adult, and when he becomes an adult, now he’s behaving like an adolescent.

When characters talk to the camera in your films, they aren’t so much addressing the audience in the vein of Woody Allen so much as offering a confession or sharing private details. Do you utilize this device to implicate the audience in these confessions or does it come from a recognition that these characters, always alone in such moments, need to speak their feelings aloud and only have the spectator to turn to?

There are a few things that I love in these sequences: the loneliness of the actor, when he has to speak to you, the audience, about his character, and as you said, it’s a conversation that the character chooses to confess in front of the camera. He has no partner, so he has to invent a partner, and it seems to me that the actor is suddenly naked. He has no chips, and he can’t fool you. He has to be straight, to get straight to the point. In the acting process, it’s something I remember vividly. I’m sorry to be so practical about that and to answer with memories of the shooting instead of my feelings, but I remember when Lou suddenly wanted to say that last letter when she’s crying. Loneliness as an actress was reaching the loneliness of the character. It was wonderful to see Lou becoming the movie, being the film, being My Golden Days. There was something also where we shot the scene where Mathieu is writing the letter and speaking to the camera. There was this line that really brought tears to my eyes, when he’s saying, “In a way or another, if only I could have been good for her.” And I guess that Mathieu was also dealing with all his own failures and the character was dealing with Esther. And that was a sort of vertigo that I love and wanted to inhabit.

I’m glad you mention vertigo, because your films are often very dialogue-heavy, yet you also, perhaps like Hitchcock, have passages of pure cinema and nods to formal characteristics of silent cinema, like with the iris effect. As a filmmaker who’s now made a number of films, how do you negotiate this tendency to tell a story realistically but also implement more formalist inclinations and has that process changed for you over the years?

I love your question. [laughs] I just love it. Because it’s a strong commitment for me. You know, in the American academy there’s this strong belief that [Leonardo] DiCaprio’s performance in The Revenant, when the character is silent, it’s pure cinema, and when the character starts talking, it’s less cinematic, or maybe more theatrical. I don’t believe that at all. I love the silent movies, but I also remember so vividly the wonderful [Ernst] Lubitsch’s American movies, where you can see characters speaking all the time. And I remember myself as a kid looking at these films and loving them. I could see adults speaking on the screen. I didn’t understand exactly what they were saying, but I loved to look at them speaking, and that the lines were sometimes elaborate.

I am keen on the idea that if you start to speak, you have to say something odd or interesting or bizarre or twisted. If it’s just naturalistic, I don’t see why the character wouldn’t just stay silent. If it’s just to say, “May I have a cup of coffee?,” I prefer to cut that line and to go straight for the odd line, one that’s more poetic or strange or obscure or philosophical, one that’s singular. If it’s a common moment, I prefer to just have a silence. A nice silence would be perfect. But I don’t see any contradiction between the interest of the formal aspect of the film and the fact that my characters are being human beings. Yes, they do speak. Just because they’re human beings and this is what we’re sharing. Language. And the funny thing about language is that we are understanding words, but we are never understanding each other. It’s really strange, this human occupation to share words and not to understand each other. It’s fascinating for me to film that paradox.

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I’m glad to hear you articulate that so precisely, because it really plays pronouncedly throughout your films.

Oh yeah, you know, I love in Goodfellas where the characters don’t stop speaking and sometimes they don’t have words any longer and there only words are just “You’re a mook,” “I’m a mook?,” “What’s a mook?” And no one knows what a mook is. And it’s great. In Casino, they just say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” You have endless fucks. And it’s just language. And who cares what it means? It’s just human beings, so they’re speaking. But I hope that it doesn’t stop me to try and invent new shapes and a playful way of filming.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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