Vibrant debut film by Léa Mysius
A mangy dog and a sleeping girl inspire Léa Mysius’s bold first feature, Ava
It all started with a striking image. A mangy black dog roams a crowded French beach, amid vacationers slathering on lotion, playing in the sand and soaking up the sun, before coming upon a sleeping teenage girl.
Léa Mysius didn’t know what it meant, but she had enough to go on. That initial spark led to a script written in just a few weeks for her final project at Paris’s La Fémis film school, after another idea had fallen through. The script became her bold first feature, Ava, a vibrant comingof-age tale that premièred earlier this year as part of Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week sidebar and screens in competition at the Festival du nouveau cinéma.
Mysius was running on fumes Wednesday morning, having arrived in Montreal at 7 a.m. on a plane from B.C., where Ava was shown at the Vancouver Film Festival. Her first visit to our fair city will be short but sweet — she leaves Friday evening for the London BFI Film Festival in the U.K.
“I liked the image of this skinny, wild dog, crossing this artificial beach,” she said, sitting on the terrasse of a downtown hotel. “I was having retinal migraines at the time, so I had to write in the dark. I couldn’t be near light. I began to wonder what would happen if I went blind.”
She became intrigued by retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease which begins with impaired vision, particularly in low light, and leads to blindness.
Soon enough, she had her titular lead character, an awkward 13-year-old girl (Noée Abita) who discovers she’s losing her sight while on a summer beach vacation with her single mom (Laure Calamy). The news prompts Ava to push herself out of her comfort zone and into the world, toward the above-noted mysterious dog and its owner, a roughedged Roma boy (Juan Cano).
“At the beginning of the film, she has a real problem with her body,” Mysius noted. “I wanted her to be very closed, impenetrable. People tell her she’s mean — I didn’t want her to be mean but aggressive, violent, stubborn and solitary.”
Access to Ava’s inner world is granted through her candid journal entries and vivid nightmares, which contribute to the film’s rich visual palette. From the outset, Mysius and her co-writer/ director of photography Paul Guilhaume knew they wanted to shoot on 35 mm film, as opposed to digital, in order to best capture the esthetic they were after.
“Ava is losing her sight,” Mysius explained. “She wants to see things before she can’t see anymore. So we wanted strong images. We wanted substance, texture and colours, especially black. Digital captures less light. And this is a film about darkness.
“It’s also a film about sensuality and desire. We needed to shoot skin, sand and the beach. Celluloid has many layers. Some people say it’s magical; there’s a subconscious, subterranean aspect to it.”
Carrying the film is charismatic newcomer Abita, who lights up the screen despite her character’s brooding ways. Mysius was expecting a long search to find the right actress, someone over 16 — the legal age in France to appear in nude scenes — who could credibly play a 13 year old.
Playing hooky from boarding school, Abita was 17 when she walked in with a friend on the first day of casting. It was love at first sight.
“We felt her aura right away,” Mysius said. “She wasn’t looking at us, but there was something intriguing in her face, her eyes, her physique. She didn’t know how to act, but she embodied the spirit of the character.
“After that, we worked a lot with her — she’s a dancer, very feminine, and speaks in a soft, high voice. We workshopped for two months to get her to walk in more of a lumbering way, to close her face and adjust her speech. We found the character by moulding the body.”
As for the film’s breezy portrayal of nudity, particularly in relation to its 13-year-old protagonist, Mysius began by explaining
that in France, of course, such things are less of a big deal, while admitting that she had to raise Ava’s age to 14, on paper, after receiving initial resistance from funding agencies. But there was no question in her mind that the nudity was essential to the story.
“It’s a film about desire and the body, so it would have felt strange to hide it,” she said. “What’s shown in the film is rather tame, and young women’s bodies are pretty.”
Ultimately, she said, it’s through Ava’s physicality that she finds her place in the world.
“It’s about the claiming of her desire, the construction of her desire as she grows into her body, which permits her to be desired, to desire and to fall in love.”