by Gill Pringle in San Sebastian
Celebrating its 72nd year, San Sebastian International Film Festival is showcasing many Australians alongside its traditional Spanish selection.
First and foremost, Cate Blanchett, who won this year’s prestigious Donostia award, a stunning black and white photograph of the actress placed throughout the city and on every cinema and ticket.
Her latest film, Rumours, was also screened following Blanchett’s emotional acceptance speech. But then there is also Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle – featuring Naomi Watts – making its World premiere at San Sebastian and competing in the prestigious Official Selection for the festival’s highest award, the Golden Shell.
Starring Noemie Merlant as the eponymous Emmanuelle – a role made infamous in 1974 by Sylvia Kristel – Diwan brings a female gaze to this story of a woman in search of lost sexual pleasure.
After Diwan won the Golden Lion at Venice three years ago for The Happening, she had her choice of projects before setting her sights on Emmanuelle.
Talking about that surprising choice, she says: “One day my producer handed me the book by Emmanuelle Arsan. I read it just for fun. First of all because I’d never seen the whole film. I didn’t feel that was meant for me, so I never watched it to the end. “But the book left me feeling ambivalent. It is filled with lots of unbearable vestiges of the 1950s; unquestioned patriarchy, triumphant colonialism. But, at the same time, it’s written in the first person by a woman. The heroine is more the subject than the object, which cannot be said of the 1974 film. The first decision that I made was to give the power back to Emmanuelle, to make her the subject of her own story.”
While the film’s indisputable star is the luminous French actress Merlant – best known for Portrait of a Lady on Fire – we were curious as to Watts’ inclusion as hotel manager Margot Parsons at the luxurious Hong Kong hotel where Emmanuelle rediscovers her passions.
A longtime fan of Watts’ performance in Mulholland Drive, Diwan tells us: “I wanted the film to have a venomous paranoid side. I was inspired by my actors’ filmographies. Of course, Naomi carries the memory of a certain cinema with her. She can be gentle and imperious at the same time. Hard to pin down.
“But Naomi was great. Margot Parsons is more archetypal because I was thinking of authority maybe in a too literal way. But then she arrived, and I think she smiled, and I was like: ‘Oh interesting’. She has a soft voice, but you never know what’s behind, and I think it’s part of her magic and it’s also why we remember her. It’s because nothing is perfectly defined. She lets you choose. She doesn’t want to be put into a box, and she plays with all the nuances of a character.”
Merlant, who shares several scenes with Watts, adds: “She was so friendly. You always think with very famous people, you can’t enter into their realm. But she is the opposite of the character and her smile is a real smile. She is so much into the work, but at the same time, gives space to you.”
Also flying the Australian flag at this year’s SSIFF are Jacob Elordi, starring opposite Richard Gere and Uma Thurman in Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, and Adam Elliot’s animated movie Memoir of a Snail, both competing in the festival’s Perlak section.
Having already collected the Cristal award at this year’s Annecy, Memoir of a Snail is the second animated feature film from the Oscar winning director of Mary and Max.
Set in 1970s Australia, the main character of Grace is voiced by Sarah Snook. A melancholy woman, her life is troubled by misfortune and loss. And when her family unit falls to pieces and she is separated from her twin brother, Gilbert – voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee – she turns to hoarding ornamental snails to ease her loneliness.
Grace finds hope within her friendship with an elderly eccentric woman called Pinky, voiced by Jacki Weaver, who gives her the courage to come out of her shell and step away from the things that overcrowd her home and her mind.
The director/writer even voices a character himself in this bittersweet story that also features Eric Bana.
Meanwhile, Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada tells the story of Leonard Fife, an exile who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War.
In the winter of his life, Fife gives a final interview to one of his former students to tell the whole truth about his life; a confession filmed in front of his wife.
Based on the book Foregone by Russell Banks (Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter), the film explores the life of an erratic and cowardly man who sought refuge in Canada without political intentions – with the older Fife played by Richard Gere and the younger by Elordi.
Elordi was an irresistible match for the role of young Fife. “I saw Euphoria, and he seemed very much like the character I would have cast in American Gigolo. And that was kind of the way you cast the young Richard!” says Schrader, who of course famously cast Gere in American Gigolo.
