By Cara Nash
More than ten feature films into her career, veteran French filmmaker Catherine Corsini (behind such films as Leaving and Three Worlds) makes her most personal film yet with Summertime, which is screening at the French Film Festival now. The romantic feature tells the story of a young girl from a rural family (pop star turned actress Izia Higelin) who moves to Paris in the seventies and begins a life-changing affair with a feminist activist (Cecile de France). FilmInk had the chance to chat to Corsini in Paris last year about the personal starting point for the film, how Blue Is The Warmest Colour affected her work, and the gender divide in France.
What was the starting point for Summertime? What made you think that this was the time to make this film?
If I’m going to be honest, I’d say it’s my producer who pushed me to do this movie. My producer is also my partner in life, Elisabeth Perez. So Elisabeth told me to make a film that really mattered to me and true enough, I’d never talked about homosexuality and how it can be difficult to come to grips with it and live it. I wanted to express that through fiction and through a form that could help young people who are faced with that. I wanted to make a film I thought I would have needed when I was young – a movie that will show young people they are not alone.
The film balances the personal and the political so deftly – what is the key to balancing those two elements in a film?
When you make a film, you start with this personal core and then you open up. I wanted to show how the development of the homosexual movement really felt from the woman’s liberation movement. In the 70’s, the women’s movement was incredibly dynamic and there was this sense of solidarity. It was really utopia. In a way, I feel that the woman’s movement was even more of a revolution than what happened here in May ’68. The changes that it brought about are the changes that make up our world today. Maybe because it was the first movie I was doing with Elisabeth, but it has the flows and qualities of a first movie. I packed so much into it – things that are very personal, but also political. I really tried to make it very rich.
When you were preparing your film, Blue Is The Warmest Colour came out. What type of impact did that have on the decisions you made, particularly the depiction of intimacy?
I was quite upset when I found out about the movie. Then things happened so quickly – between first hearing about it and it being released and winning the Palme d’or. I was in the midst of writing my script. But I decided not to give up on my project because how many films about heterosexual love have there been? There’s been zillions of them. So I figured two movies about homosexual love wasn’t really too much. I might have wished I was the first one, but I wasn’t. On the other hand, I guess it’s okay it was [Abdellatif] Kechiche because as a man, it made people more open to see his movie. Maybe viewers went to see his film in greater numbers than they might have if the director had been a woman. So I thought it paved the ground for me and helped me to a certain degree.
I saw Kechiche’s movie and thought that I would not shoot love scenes. I would stick to the story and the narration, but then I started shooting my film and I was with those lovely, gorgeous women. They’re not the standard skinny women. Back then in the 70’s, women had hairy armpits and real bodies. I thought that was important to show. I wanted to show them in a different way to Kechiche’s film where to a certain extent there might be an element of voyeurism. The way I wanted to shoot the love scenes was more like seeing the emotion born from love and showing how much desire, appetite, hunger, tenderness and beauty there is. I’m a woman showing love between two women, it’s got to be different from a man showing a similar story.
While the gender divide seems to be just as pronounced in France as in the US or Australia, there doesn’t seem to be as much heated discussion here over barriers for female filmmakers. Would you agree with that?
Maybe we talk less about this imbalance between male and females because we always lag behind in terms of discussing issues, but I often find that female characters aren’t very interesting and are very limited. Sometimes I sit on film commissions and I’m appalled at the characters that are offered to actresses. They’re not exciting parts. They play the spouse or the wife and it’s limited. We have the same problem, with one exception that some elderly actresses get to work.
When I started around ’85, I was doing shorts and back then it felt like there was just as many female directors as men. Now if I look around, I see who has survived from my generation of filmmakers and it’s mainly men, but things are changing and there’s a shift and that comes from film schools. In film schools, you have this whole generation of very talented women who are coming forth, and there’s some renewal there.
I think that women really need to work hard to impose themselves because women don’t get much feedback. What they do is not transmitted that much in the media. Cinema remains something that is very masculine. It’s a man’s world and actresses are seen and fantasised about by men. There’s violence to women and violence in cinema so if you want to impose a feminine vision of cinema, you have to change the way stories are told and perceived. There’s one filmmaker who did that in a wonderful way – and that’s Jane Campion.
Summertime is screening at the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, which is playing around the country now.
