Céline Sciamma: ‘My films are always about a few days out of the world’
Céline Sciamma makes small films about stolen moments, secret selves and outsiders who have crafted a vital life in the shadows. Her subjects are the overlooked and the unrecognised, whether that’s a band of black schoolgirls from the Paris banlieue or windswept gay lovers in 18th-century Brittany. One way or another, these people are in search of sanctuary and empowerment. Her fanbase, I’m guessing, have already found both in her work.
“In all my films, it’s always the same,” she says. “It’s always about a few days out of the world, where we can meet each lover, love each other. Also it’s always about female characters because they can be themselves only in a private place where they can share their loneliness, their dreams, their attitudes, their ideas.” Her pictures are intended as a kind of safe space. Obviously for the protagonists; hopefully for an audience, too.
I’ve been following Sciamma’s career for more than a decade, fondly imagining her as a vibrant niche interest only to belatedly realise that I’m merely part of a herd – and that, moreover, its numbers are growing by the year. On the eve of her 43rd birthday, she’s jumped from the arthouse fringes of Water Lilies and Tomboy to score a cult hit with Girlhood and kiss the mainstream with 2019’s award-winning period romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire. At this year’s London film festival, the director is roared onstage like some conquering heroine; the creator of intimate human dramas that cry out to the world. “A victim of my own success,” she snorts. “Well, yeah, maybe that’s not a bad problem to have.”
We meet one grey Saturday morning inside a cloistered hotel suite overlooking the road. She’s only just risen and is still readying for battle. She has sleep-dust in her eyes, a mask hooked about the elbow of her bomber jacket and a pack of Marlboro Gold on the table at her side. As soon as we’re done, she admits, she’s nipping outside for a smoke.
Sciamma has grown big. Fortunately, the films have stayed small. Her latest, Petite Maman, is a gorgeous miniature, a fairytale of sorts, complete with a haunted cottage, a magic forest and a primitive treehouse that doubles as a time-machine. In the course of a svelte 72-minute running time, Sciamma spins the story of eightyear-old Nelly, reeling from the death of her grandmother, who befriends a girl in the woods behind the abandoned family home. A more conventional picture might have chosen to tease out the connection between these two playmates. Petite Maman, to its credit, cuts straight to the chase. “I’m your daughter,” Nelly tells Marion. “I come from the path behind you.”
The trouble with drama, says Sciamma, is that it’s invariably built around ideas of conflict. It’s about rivals and enemies; resolution through violence. Whereas she wanted to do something different: to construct a tense, high-stakes drama in which the players are open and broadly on the same page. She says: “If you start a scene where the characters are negotiating and agreeing, I’m suddenly full of attention. Now what’s going to happen? The possibilities are limitless. This scene could go anywhere.”
Specifically where Petite Maman goes is deep into the relationship between an unreliable mother and her bruised, anxious child. Its magic-realist conceit serves to erase the years and place its two protagonists eye-toeye. The tragedy of families, Sciamma explains, is that we are only in sync with our parents when we reach the age that they were – and by that point of course they have already moved on. “We only meet our mothers politically when we grow up. We understand the decisions they made and the specific pressures they were under. The political system. The reproductive system. At some point we read the world the same as they did. But through fiction, through time-travel, we can do it from a place of equality.”
Watching Petite Maman, with its spooky wood and eerie children (perfectly embodied by twins Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz), I caught myself thinking of Angela Carter’s short stories, or some mysterious painting by Paula Rego. Sciamma cites Hayao Miyazaki and Back to the Future as other possible references. But inevitably the real inspiration was much closer to home. “I designed it as a kind of therapeutic tool,” she says. “And there was a personal question I asked myself with this film. If I met my mother when [we were both] eight years old, what would our relationship be? Would she be my sister? Would we be friends? Would we share the same father? All those kind of things.”
It must have been strange for her mother, watching those questions played out on the screen. “Yeah, I don’t know.” She shakes her head; her earrings dance. “She saw the film. I know she saw the film. She didn’t comment on it.”
You didn’t ask her? Another headshake, this one almost frantic. “Ah,” she says. “No.”
The penny drops. Oh, I say. You and your mum are not close.
“No.” Sciamma winces. “I mean, this is not something to say. Not something to discuss. But I’m not going to bullshit you. It’s true, we’re not close.”
* * *
Sciamma was raised in Cergy-Pontoise, north-west of Paris, ostensibly by her parents, spiritually by the movies. Her paternal grandmother, she recalls, was a fan of classic Hollywood: Fred Astaire, Cary Grant and James Stewart. And then as a teen she discovered Utopia, an arthouse cinema in Cergy that she would visit as much as three times every week. It was inside Utopia that she got the idea of working in film, although her first job after college was in the marketing department of an internet startup. “It was the early 2000s, the moment of the startups. In nine months we lived the whole life of a business. It was a business flight simulator. We’re up, we’re flying. Argh, we’ve crashed.” She laughs. “After that I went to film school.”
Sciamma’s plan was to become a screenwriter, possibly a critic. Directing felt too precarious a profession, too much a male-only preserve. In the event she promptly landed behind the camera, shooting the script she had written as her final-year project. It was, she recalls, her first time calling the shots. Her first time as the leader.
She winces again when she says the L-word. “Yeah, leader, it sounds so arrogant and patriarchal. But cinema has a very strong hierarchy. And as a director you have to answer all the questions. If someone lights a cigarette they show you 10 boxes of matches and you pick the one to be used. Basically that’s the job. What kind of light switch do you want on the wall? What colour paint do you want on the wall? So yes, you’re the leader. But what you are doing is answering 50 or 60 or 100 questions a day.”
The sexually charged Water Lilies was a classic first film, a statement of intent. Sciamma shot it in her home town of Cergy, installing her partner, Adèle Haenel, as the centrepiece of a synchronised swimming team. She wanted to bottle the confusion and longing of adolescence; to make every viewer see the world through the eyes of a teenage girl. But the shock of the new blindsided some critics. “Watching [Water Lilies],” wrote the Observer’s Philip French at the time, “makes male viewers feel like voyeurs.”
“Ouch!” says Sciamma when I read this aloud. “That’s crazy. That’s not what I meant. But it’s always interesting, people’s perception of the film, because it’s always changing.”
That’s the thing about films. They’re different each time we revisit them, but that’s because we’ve changed, or the culture’s changed. She explains that Water Lilies contains a scene in which Haenel’s heroine is pressured into sex with her boyfriend. Sciamma was thinking about it the other day and realised that what she’d actually filmed was a rape. “But I would never have called it that. It was just firsttime sex going bad. And then later on the boy comes back and tries to kiss her and she spits in his mouth. Now at the time, 2007, everyone in the audience went ‘Ugh’, because they were disgusted with her for doing that. Now it’s different. Right before the pandemic, Adèle showed the film at a high school and she called me up after and said that the reaction had changed. Everyone was whooping and clapping. They thought she’d done the right thing.”
At this point she is briefly interrupted by a coughing fit. She doubles over; her earrings jiggle. She says: “It’s OK, I got tested,” and gestures at the packet on the table. It’s the cigarettes – not the virus – that are messing with her lungs.
Haenel and Sciamma’s relationship fizzled out after a few years. But their creative collaboration continues to this day. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Haenel plays Héloïse, an aristocrat betrothed to a Milanese nobleman, who embarks on a passionate affair with the artist (played by Noémie Merlant) sent to paint her. Again it’s a film in thrall to the female gaze, a story about staring at beauty and then painting it on the screen. Sciamma has likened the process of making it to a set of nesting dolls: her looking at the camera looking at Merlant looking at Haenel. Tangentially, the film explores the complexities of Sciamma and Haenel’s relationship – almost to the point where it dovetails with an older, more sexist tradition. Isn’t it, at heart, a film about the great artist and the muse?
Sciamma has barely recovered from one coughing fit. Now I’m in danger of provoking another. “No, no,” she splutters. “It’s just the opposite. Yes of course it’s me and Adèle and of course it’s talking about the idea of the muse. But it’s subverting it, getting rid of it. Portrait is saying that there’s no such thing as a muse. It’s only collaborators inspiring each other.”
Buoyed up by rave reviews, Portrait of a Lady on Fire picked up nine nominations at the César awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars). It took home only one (for Claire Mathon’s luminous cinematography). When Roman Polanski (who was arrested for drugging and sexually assaulting 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977, spending 42 days in jail before fleeing the US) was controversially named as the winner of the best director prize, Sciamma and Haenel left the ceremony in protest. Footage from the event showed Haenel
applauding sarcastically and shouting: “Bravo paedophilia!”
Sciamma pulls a face. It’s a subject she would prefer not to discuss; the walk-out was statement enough. “It was a thing that happened,” she says. “It just happened, that’s all.”
A public protest at the Césars doesn’t just happen. “No, OK.” She pulls a face. “But there was no plan. It’s all about the moment, a matter of seconds. It’s about moving your legs, as simple as that. And that’s hard. It’s hard to stand up, hard to move your legs. I understand why people don’t. But sometimes you have to.”
In any case, the issue wasn’t so much Polanski as the culture itself. The French film establishment, she feels, is institutionally sexist, unapologetically hidebound. The industry is run by old white men who are terrified of change. That’s why she’s had to carve out a space on the margins, celebrating her rebel girls and their secret lives. She says that if her homeland won’t listen, maybe the rest of the world will.
In July, Julia Ducournau’s bloody body-horror Titanewon the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In September Audrey Diwan’s exacting abortion drama Happeningtook the top prize at Venice.
Then, later that month, Petite Maman completed a hat-trick of French victories by claiming the audience award at the San Sebastián film festival. “So, you see, I think it’s finally changing,” says Sciamma. “French female filmmakers are becoming more of a presence, because they are becoming more global, with more international funding and recognition. And yes, I see the Golden Lion in Venice and the Palme d’Or in Cannes being handed to French women by international juries and it makes me happy. It’s a good sign, a big change. It means we no longer have to rely on our own industry to survive.”
That’s putting a positive spin on a bad situation. She’s saying French cinema is stuck in the mud but thankfully the world has now thrown it a lifeline. “Well, yeah,” she laughs. “But that’s better than us still being stuck in the mud, too.”
We’ve talked for more than an hour and those cigarettes aren’t going to smoke themselves. We take the stairs to the street, where it has now started to rain. “You want one?” she says, but I reckon I’ve detained her long enough. She’s under an awning, her collar turned up, patting her pockets to locate a lighter. She’s finally earned a stolen moment of her own.
is in cinemas from 19 November
If you start a scene where the characters are agreeing, I’m suddenly full of attention. Now what’s going to happen?