EVA IONESCO AND SIMON LIBERATI, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
In her second feature film Une jeunesse dorée ( Gilded Youth), Eva Ionesco continues the fictionalized autobiography she began with My Little Princess in 2011. For Numéro, her husband, the author Simon Liberati, interviewed her about this flamboyant period of her youth at the heart of Paris’s 80s nightlife.
SIMON LIBERATI: Your film Une
jeunesse dorée tells the story of young lovers Rose and Michel, who are thrown into the lion’s den of the Palace [ a legendary 80s nightspot in Paris] and end up losing each other in the maelstrom of the city’s nightlife. EVA IONESCO: Just like in your first
novel, Anthologie des apparitions. That’s why I sought your help to finish the script. So it’s that period of your life that youreco un tin the movie, acon tinuation of your fiction alized autobiography which began with
My Little Princess, your first feature film. In that first picture, your avatar was called Violet ta, but now she’s cal led Rose. She comes out of foster care and goes straight to the Palace where she loses her first love. The question I really want to ask you, is how did you go about f inding your younger sel f? How did Galatea Bellugi, who plays you as Eva in the film, convince you she was right for the role? Well, to be honest, I was having trouble finding the actress I needed. And then this young Italian came along. She was very intense, with large eyes and an astonishing ability to transform herself and control her depths. While she perhaps doesn’t yet have life experience, she has something that comes from afar, a sort of troubled water that fills her eyes. Did you see that straight away? By getting her to do a lot of improvisations, I noticed this steadiness in the intensity of her gaze, which remained throughout all her metamorphoses, and I said to myself: “She’s the one.” There was always a lot of expectation at each meeting, because she lives in Denmark and it was difficult to see her. Opposite Rose, there’s Michel, her f irst love, who’s played by your son. One day you told me that you started thinking of making films, of writing scripts, when Lukas was born, 23 years ago. So I’m guessing the casting of that role was a little easier. I’ve always wanted to work with him. There’s a double mirror effect. In real life, Lukas and Galatea are very different f rom the roles they play. Galatea isn’t at all like the part I wrote, and my son is much nicer than Michel, the film’s hero. Yet, during the improvisations, something slightly disturbing immediately established itself between Galatea and Lukas, a fascinating twinning. They seem like brother and sister. There was something of… something Cocteau talks about with respect to the prohibitions of childhood. Two beings fascinated by each other and who are both very narcissistic, so in the end there’s so met hingrather suicida la boutitall. They egg each other on while looking at each other, and there’s something that catches fire very quickly which bursts out from all that. During the improvisation period, you invent loads of lit tle situations that aren’t in the script, and you construct a sor t of common memory between the actors, for this movie the boulevard Magenta gang. There’s a lot of background, memories that don’ t appear in the f i lm but which st ructure the actors’ per formances. Is this a method you learnt in the theatre with Vitez or Chéreau? No, but having acted in films myself, I found that that was what was missing. I like the idea of a troupe. That’s why I wanted to work with Isabelle Huppert again. In the first film she played my mother, but in this one she’s a dif ferent woman, Lucille, Rose’s rival, which adds something slightly troubling… But I liked the idea of her coming back once more to this personal story, in a different role this time, as in a troupe. I know she likes the idea of a troupe too. Di d she re hearse wi th the others? No, Isabelle is way too busy. She rehearses during costume fittings. The dresses f rom the Mugler archives, which I discovered when watching the rushes for the first time, are incredible, especially with the pendant tiara… It looks like the one worn by the casino manager in The Shanghai Gesture by Josef von Sternberg… Thier ry Mugler was the great coutur ier of the time in which your film is set. The film pays him homage, but we had other lenders too, like Jean Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld. Let ’ s come back to the actors. Melvil Poupaud: the character he plays, Huber t , is entirely fictional, like the Lucille played by Hupper t. He’s a mixture of several models, people who fre - quented society salons back then, a species that doesn’ t really exist anymore. Melvil really took part in the rehearsals and brought a lot to the role, giving Hubert this slightly louche side, half gigolo half toff. And how long did it take you to find Alain- Fabien Delon? He plays a character dis tant l y inspired by Vincent Darré. We watched Alain- Fabien in interview and immediately wanted to work with him because there was a form of truth that came out of his mouth, and it was very striking. He
has something burning and yet wellbred that’s completely different to all the “cool” young actors today. And he’s very handsome! A lot of the action takes place in a house in the country called Ballielme. When Rose is pursed by the foster service because she’s bunked of f school, she seeks refuge wi th Michel at Lucille and Hubert’s in Ballielme, and they begin a foursome. Ballielme has its roots in an old friend from those days, François Baudot, who’s dead now. He was a mythomaniac and was always going on about an imaginary house in the country. It became Ballielme, an isolated dacha like in Chekhov’s plays. You shot at Groussay, Charles de Beistegui’s château. I was so happy to work at Groussay, because of all the phantoms and also because of the little theatre all in silk, based on Bayreuth, where people from the Comédie- Française were bussed in to perform. It’s so as to act in the theatre that your heroine, Rose, leaves her fiancé. She says, “I don’t want to live this life anymore,” meaning the Palace. Was acting a way for you to escape the dangers you were talking about earlier, from this life that was like a film noir?
Quite possibly. You watch a lot of films – what’s the first one you remember? The Wizard of Oz, on the television when I lived in San Francisco at my grandmother’s. I didn’t imagine it could come to France, I thought I’d never see it again. And a little later, in France, on Sunday evening TV, Hôtel du Nord, with Arletty. I also remember Banana Split at Action Christine [ a repertory cinema in Paris’s Latin Quarter], which made me laugh so much. The Palace gang was often to be found at Action Christine and the Cinémathèque française… Yes, the Act ion cinemas, the Olympics… We adored the New Wave, film noir and American films of the 50s. Next to the boulevard Magenta apartment where I was flat-sharing with Charles Serruya, my f iancé at th e t ime, Phi l ippe Krootchey, Babette Hulin, Francis Dorléans and Vincent Darré, there was the Louxor cinema and also another one, the Delta, which became a Guerrisol, where we used to watch absolutel y extraordinary Egyptian musicals. Is the boulevard Magenta apar tment the model for the flat in Une
jeunesse dorée? Yes. We had a fairly big Haussmanntype place located right opposite the Louxor. We used to walk to the Palace, and we also used to go to the boulevard de Rochechouart, up by Pigalle, which had kept its old atmosphere. In the middle of the boulevard there was the fair, with shooting stands and strip- tease joints. There was one called Chez Marcelle, where some of the girls in the gang would occasionally work. I remember a line that was cut during the montage: “If we can’t pay the rent I’ll go back to Chez Marcell e and do s t r i ptease.” Were the funfair atmosphere and 1950s vamps the star ting point for your inspiration? Yes, the gi r l s in [ Jean- Pier re] Melville’s films, like Isabelle Corey in Bob le Flambeur, but also Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, or Silvana Mangano in Riso Amaro by Giuseppe De Santis. We didn’t have a video player, they were so expensive back then, so all these films were difficult to see, and we coveted them because we’d seen stills in Ciné Revue or Positif, or in books like L’Érotisme au cinéma. It was the stills that first brought us to the films. We spent hours looking at the photos, and we lived our lives like in a movie. To the point where life seemed bigger to us than cinema. You mean the movies were larger than life? No, life was bigger… There was so much happening. We rode around in a Citroën DS, we dressed like in the 1950s, we met all sorts of people. Paris was dangerous, we didn’t know if we would survive or not, we took risks and drugs, we didn’t know how to pay the rent. So you would return to the cinema to escape all that… I remember a scene in the fi rst scr ipt where they all go to see a film. Yes, an epic with martyrs and lions. Rose stole the photos of the martyrs and lions. It was very funny.
Une jeunesse dorée, by Eva Ionesco, out
on 16 January.