European Films

 

Most interviews with filmmakers take place in swanky hotel rooms or on sun-lit terraces overlooking the sea. Of course, these interviews are part of the huge publicity machine that is generated either by the distributor of a Hollywood film or a fancy festival in summertime Cannes or Venice. In winter, in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, one of the world’s most important film festivals organises things differently. I interviewed Belgian director Joachim Lafosse -- whose Nue propriété (Private Property) was shown there after its world premiere in Venice some months earlier -- in the narrow corridor that led to the downstairs men’s room in a downtown cinema.

Boyd van Hoeij: How would you define European cinema – if it exists?
Joachim Lafosse: It does exist, at least economically. Artistically it does not. There are as many cinemas as there are European auteurs. Europe represents different pluralities, also in its films, and cinema is not a nationalist endeavour.

What would you like a normal person, who admires your work but knows nothing about Joachim Lafosse, to know about you?
I would like her to know about the films that I’ve made. That’s all. If she could be delivered a cinema ticket for those, that would be nice. In a way, I’d like to be like Milan Kundera. He sells millions of books but no one knows what he even looks like. I try to make films that are self-explanatory, or at least stimulate discussion.

In Nue propriété, form and content are very strongly linked through your use of the stationary camera and people being literally caged in by boundaries of the frame. Did the story flow from a desire to shoot a film in that way or vice versa?
For me, being a filmmaker means finding the closest possible link between content and form; between what is in the picture and what is in the story. Perhaps, sometimes I do not succeed, but that is at least what I always strive for. The fixed camera idea was something that fitted really well with the story I wanted to tell.

Was it clear from the beginning Jérémie and Yannick would be playing the twins?
When I started writing, I knew the brothers had to be twins because I have a twin brother and two half-brothers who are also twins, so this is a subject that interests me. I also really wanted to work with the Reniers, so that was all decided on really quickly.

Unlike the Reniers, Isabelle Huppert joined the production very late...
Yes. In fact, the film is a Belgian film, with a Belgian crew and Belgian actors, except for Isabelle. Though I said films are not nationalistic, I would say Nue propriété is a Belgian film made by Belgians. When we had a hole to fill in the financing of the film, a French production company came on board. During the five years we had been working on the film, it had always been our dream to have Isabelle Huppert play the mother, but we never actually spoke about it until the French company became part of the project. Then our dream came true.

Near the end, there is a scene where Jérémie’s character Thierry bursts out into tears that is very reminiscent of the final scene in L’enfant (The Child), another Belgian film…
I know! [Smiles.] I admire the Dardennes [the brothers who directed L’enfant], and we share the same obsessions, including the family and how violence is transmitted. But I also feel close to filmmakers such as Pialat, Bergman and Cassavetes. And my film looks nothing like L’enfant [which is mostly filmed with handheld cameras]!

A question that many journalists will have asked you: to which of the two brothers, the introvert and more gentle François or the bullish and pushy Thierry, do you feel closest?
Yes, everyone asks me this indeed. Having written [with François Pirot] and directed Nue propriété, I can safely say I am actually all the characters. I am quite good-humoured normally, so I could be François, but I also have shades of Thierry.

Besides Fien Troch [the Flemish director of this year’s Belgian Oscar submission Een ander zijn geluk/Someone Else’s Happiness], the Dardenne brothers, Ursula Meier and Chantal Akerman, there are not that many other working directors who are part of the Belgian scene. In Belgium, there is more of a culture of making good documentaries, and the quality of our fiction comes from that documentary background. But it is hard to really speak of a Belgian cinema when the country is divided in two because of language differences. Often they take the Belgian cinema to mean Walloon [French-language] cinema, and Flemish [or Dutch-language] cinema is quite separate.

 

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