Christophe Honoré Day

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'I wouldn't say my films are in the style of the New Wave. It is increasingly difficult to raise money for independent films in France. So we're in the same situation as the New Wave films made in the 1960s. We can either wait two or three years to get all the money we need or you film fast, with actors you like, in the street. You make films the way you write a love letter. There is a return to 'Frenchness' in French films - something I don't like. It's a very bourgeois, very formulaic. I want to put the sheer joy of filmmaking at the heart of my films. I am a grandchild of the New Wave, so I can afford to be more arrogant, light-hearted and playful with the legacy.' -- Christophe Honore

'Of all the relatively young European directors of the last few years, Christophe Honoré is probably the one with the most ambivalent, divisive and sadly underseen filmography. The peculiarity of this filmmaker is that the reaction to his movies, mostly positive in France and rather indifferent in the rest of the world, is often reduced to critics comparing him with old French cinema, some whining about the persistence of such passé filmmaking and some others lauding Honoré's modern vision of the nouvelle vague. In short, Honoré is a young director who is divisive not because of controversial cinematic choices, but rather because he's too enamored with the past and tries to bring it back at all costs. So what to make of this kid who wants to be an enfant terrible by looking at enfants terribles from fifty years ago? The answer lies perhaps in the way one looks at his movies. Too fond of their own bond with the past? No. Too explicit in the way that bond is formed? Sure. Manneristic in the most absurdly obvious way possible? Absolutely. But is all Mannerism bad? Not at all. It's very difficult to call stale or repetitive – as some critics have done – this research of the glorious past of French filmmaking that, in Honoré, has the same erratic flavor that the original nouvelle vague had. There's something lively, exciting, with a fluid quality, in the way the stylistic and emotional reality of nouvelle vague is brought back to life in the works of this strange auteur. He is, probably, the only director of the last twenty years who has managed to truly capture the fleeting quality of nouvelle vague, a quality that is both visual – the swift camera movements, the beautiful and ballet-like way the characters move – and thematic, in the way feelings, relationships and the primary concepts of life and death are explored.' -- International Cinephile Society



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Further

Christophe Honore @ IMDb
Christophe Honore page @ EVENE
Christophe Honore @ Facebook
Christophe Honore on adapting George Bataille's 'Ma Mere'
Christophe Honore DVDs @ CDUniverse



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General


Christophe Honore discusses 'Homme au Bain'


Transversales Christophe Honoré episode 1


Louis Garrel invité d'honneur du festival Paris Cinema 2010



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Interview: Christophe Honoré & Louis Garrel

You said in a previous interview that French cinema has lost its sense of adolescence. What did you mean?

Christophe Honoré: I get irritated by the lesson-giving aspect of some French cinema, where you feel like it wants to teach the audience something—usually clichés and platitudes. What I like best about the Nouvelle Vague films are their roughness, their teenage arrogance. They’d go from one thing to another without getting bothered by too much formality. I like that sense of something being unfinished, of films that search for themselves as they go along.

But your own movies are formally sophisticated.

CH: I admire directors who make internally consistent films. A Bresson movie impresses me, and at the same time I’m completely unable to work that way. If I stage a sequence I’m pleased with, the next day I’ll take a completely different approach.

I hear 'Love Songs' happened really quickly.

CH: Yeah, it was done quickly and on the cheap, which can make things complicated when you shoot in Paris. It made us a little anxious. The very first day, we had a permit to shoot on a particular sidewalk, and I decided to shoot on the opposite one. The police arrived within five minutes. We had to argue with them for an hour, and we were only on the other side of the street!

Louis Garrel: Plus, locals don’t really like film shoots in Paris. They are perceived as something done by privileged people, some show-business thing. People don’t welcome filmmaking, as if it wasn’t made for them. It’s perceived as something aggressive.

You had originally written Ismaël as being in his forties. How would that have impacted his relationship with the character played by Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, who’s in high school?

CH: It would have been more transgressive. What’s funny now is that the teenager picks Ismaël, who falls for it like an idiot. [Laughs] I like that character a lot. Normally in a French or American movie, there would be something about his coming out: You introduce a young gay guy, so he has to make a statement, whereas what I like about the way it is in the movie is that he doesn’t care—he’s already moved beyond that. All the characters have some kind of sexual freedom. It may be a little utopian. I hope it’s not too harmonious—I’m always wary of harmony in sexuality, like, people at ease in their bodies are a little boring.

Another connection with the New Wave is that you shoot fast: You just made three films in a year and a half.

CH: Godard used to say, “I don’t understand why you’d entrust a movie to a director who hasn’t done anything in five years. It’s as if you gave a plane to a pilot who hasn’t flown in five years.” It’s true: Filmmaking is about experience. You need to make a lot of mistakes to understand how it works.

Louis, is it the same for actors?

LG: I have this theory about acting: I try to apply in my work what I like in others’. I don’t enjoy seeing actors too often—when I see them in too many movies, it’s difficult to go along with their screen stories. So that makes it complicated for me, because I don’t want to be omnipresent.

CH: It’s important to be rare. On the other hand, it was really interesting when Depardieu would work with Bertolucci and [Marco] Ferreri at the same time. If you’re working with very different directors, it’s fine. What’s a pain is to see Isabelle Carré 20 times in the same movie. That’s terminally boring.

LG: When you make a movie, you put everything that happened to you in it: your memories, your thoughts, your gestures. If all you do is make movies, you recycle things you did on other shoots. It becomes a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror. Life isn’t the main inspiration anymore.



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7 of Christophe Honore's 10 films

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from Ma mere (2003)
'Broadly speaking, films fall into two categories: those you watch for pleasure and those you watch to broaden your horizons. Ma mère is a film that assuredly doesn’t fall into the first category (except for those who have some very weird ideas as to what constitutes entertainment), but probably does belong to the second. It certainly pushes the boundaries as far as explicit sexual content is concerned. Definitely not for the faint-hearted, with images of a deeply disturbing nature, Ma mere is a film that is almost too shocking to watch – not because it is necessarily, from an artistic point of view, a bad film, but because the themes it deals with are at the very limit of acceptability. If the thought of a teenager wanking over his mother’s corpse is likely to offend, you’d be advised to give this film a very wide berth.' -- filmsdefrance



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from Dans Paris (2006)
'Dans Paris is writer-director Honoré’s fourth feature, following the sex-and-death Georges Bataille adaptation, Ma mère. With its tricky tonal shifts, Honoré is clearly onto something with his pacing; he allows time for the important scenes, but creates room for odd interludes—the father dragging a Christmas tree along a sidewalk, or Paul listening to an old Kim Wilde 45 as he lolls on his bed. It should feel distended, but the overall flow is right. One of the gifts of the New Wave was the idea that movies could convey the delight of making films, watching them, thinking about them. Since then, filmmakers outside Hollywood have become more skeptical about the use and power of cinema (as Godard was already in the early Sixties, but the fizz was still there). With Dans Paris, Honoré circles back to those pleasures. Dans Paris is an attempt to estimate joy.' -- Film Society of Lincoln Center



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from Les chansons d'amour (2007)
'As Louis Garrel effortlessly walks along the streets of Paris as a new Jean-Pierre Léaud (the resemblance is quite impressive), both careless and pensive at the same time, owning the world and yet fearful of being part of it, Les chansons d'amour tells a story that is almost irritating in its simplicity and captivating in its fluidity. Love, and by that I don't necessarily mean romantic love, is taken for granted and then put at risk; it's ridiculed and then elevated to something lyrical; it is lost forever and then found again unexpectedly. And it has the infinite and burlesque joy of nouvelle vague as three French kids walk around in the rain calling each other names at the sound of music; it has the deliciously spicy and sensual boldness of nouvelle vague as a ménage-a-trois is the starting point from which everything else takes form; it has the sorrowful passion of nouvelle vague as a woman remembers her dead sister and mourns her in song; it has the levity of nouvelle vague as a new love starts shaping up to a song that is sung through cellphones and accompanied by a graceful ballet that just happens, unplanned and gone in a moment.' -- icsfilms.com



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from La Belle Personne (2008)
'Léa Seydoux is blessed with the sort of face that appears to convey a thousand different emotions without ever having to move a muscle. Her smile is beautiful but it almost feels like an intrusion, breaking the exquisite mystery of her passive, brooding expressions. Much has been written about her resemblance to Godard’s muse, Anna Karina, which perhaps inspired New Wave successor Christophe Honoré to direct her in this evocative drama. La belle personne (a.k.a. “The Beautiful Person”) could’ve easily been made in the ’60s. Within the walls of its claustrophobic school, hormonal urges and repressed desires materialize in the form of pointed glances and scribbled notes as opposed to Facebook posts. Gossip is spread the old fashioned way, without the assistance of a Twitter feed. Body language emerges as the primary tool of communication. When a tight embrace is mistaken for a kiss, it can lead to devastating consequences.' -- Hollywoodchicago



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from Non Ma Fille, Tu N'iras pas Danser (2009)
'The beguiling and deft new drama from acclaimed writer-director Christophe Honoré ("Inside Paris", "Love Songs") portrays a brave single mother struggling against her family of do-gooders. Léna (Chiara Mastroianni, in the performance of her career) is a young, unemployed mother of two who has left her partner and valiantly soldiers through life as best as she can. But she is as confused by her needs and desires while her family and friends seem certain of theirs. When she heads from Paris to her parents' bucolic home in Brittany for the holidays, she's thrown to the mercy of her supportive but oppressive family, who one by one begin to dish out unsolicited advice. Neither comedy nor tragedy, Honoré's latest is a slow-burning, handsome saga, held together by the wonderfully drawn female characters, and marks the biggest success so far for the gifted filmmaker.' -- Cinema of the Worlds



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from Homme au Bain (2010)
'Christophe Honoré has made a series of critical favorites over the last few years, garnering enough praise to place him among the giants of contemporary French cinema. Popularity often gives artists room to play around, a freedom reflected in the relative smallness of his latest feature, Man at Bath (“Homme Au Bain”). Filmed with a shaky cam style and predominantly built around a series of sexual encounters, Man at Bath constantly shifts between Emmanuel’s aimless, philandering lifestyle in the Parisian suburb Gennevilliers and Omar’s trip to New York, which is seen exclusively through the lens of his camcorder. Although both men invest their energies in forgetting about the other, and neither gets a monologue to explain their feelings, leaving much of their turmoil up for interpretation. They express more through sexuality than dialogue.' -- indiewire



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from Les Bien-aimés (2011)
'Christophe Honoré — director of bittersweet, entertaining pictures like Love Songs and Dans Paris — makes films that seem very, very French when you’re watching them in New York, but merely enjoyably normal when you see them in France. Les Bien-Aimés (Beloved), is a family epic — as well as a musical and a romance — that lasts nearly two-and-a-half hours. And in the Honoré tradition, it’s not afraid of overstating its emotions — like Love Songs, it blends musical numbers into the narrative a la The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — which isn’t the sort of thing that too many American directors would even attempt these days. That’s the way it is with Honoré: No matter where you watch his movies, he always gives you a little bit of l’amour fou to take home with you.' -- Movieline



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Christophe Honore interviewed about 'Les Bien-aimés'
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p.s. Hey. So, tomorrow morning I train to London for The Weaklings show. Hence, there won't be the usual p.s. tomorrow, just a post, intro, and a hello. As best I can tell, I'll be able to do the blog as usual while I'm London, although the p.s. could well be more hurried and shortish than is normal. Long story short, I'll respond to the comments that you guys post here today and tomorrow on Thursday. ** Thomas Moronic, Lovely talking to you, Thomas, and thanks so much for doing that. Everyone, the eminent Thomas Moronic interviewed me last evening about The Weaklings art show for Transductions, and you can read the results right here, if you like. Really looking forward to seeing you on Friday, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Yeah, Sistine Chapel sounds about right. Funny you mentioned 'Ma Mere' yesterday since, well ... voila. It's true that Outfest should have programmed 'Homme au Bain'. I wonder why they didn't? I'm sure it's better than at least 90% of the stuff they're showing. ** MANCY, Hi. Mark is pretty astute, so I think I can take his word for it. Thanks for the myspace hookup. I'll go over there later, and, sure, I would love mp3s of your old album, if you don't mind and if it's no trouble. Wish you could be there for the Weaklings opening on Friday, obviously. But I think I'll be able to put up a big slideshow of the show on Monday. ** Tosh, Hey! Theme parks have a dark, depressing aspect for sure. Luckily for me, the dark and depressing brings out my moth side. Sometimes. Yeah, sad about Martin Rushent. Apparently, he was in the midst of gearing up for a big comeback, and I don't know what happened. I agree those two Pete Shelley albums that Rushent produced are great and way underrated. He did produce Buzzcocks. Also Generation-X, the first two and best Stranglers albums, Rezillos, Shirley Bassey, Go-Gos, etc., and of course Human League, Joy Division. ** Bill, I can't guarantee Paris will stay cloudy, rainy, cool like it is right now, and I probably can guarantee the opposite, but it should be much milder outside here than in Berlin because it almost always is. Never had heard the term 'kervork'. Interesting. Not bad. Oh, yeah, that's a great Joy Williams story. Man, is it way, way past time for a new book by her. ** Statictick, Thanks, N. Nice, right? Love that shit. Wow, that's interesting and intense about the ten hour eeg. Yeah, I mean it's really good to get technical, internal things about yourself figured out. So, the bright side is the way to go. I guess it might be a stretch to try to see it as some kind of personalized theme park ride-like experience. Is it happening soon? Yeah, love to you, man. ** Tim Jones-Yelvington, Ha ha ha, yes. Very good, sir. ** Bernard Welt, Paris can sustain a theme park conceptual overlay, or that would explain why I still feel like a lucky tourist here after almost six years. Sure, I'd love to have my brain picked by you re: museum/school. On the 8th, okay. The first two weeks of July are Yury's summer work vacation, and I'm negotiating with him to take short out of town trips since you and Bill will be here, and I want to be here then, obviously. If the Recollets didn't respond to your question about Art, it's probably okay, although I wouldn't push it too much. I would just have him be here and leave it at the unspoken assumption that he's staying with you 'cos there are rules about that, although I think with people's partners, the rules are loosened. Shouldn't be a problem, is what I'm saying. I'll think of day trips. I've been wanting to go to the Loire Valley. That might be of interest if you like France's best castles. A seminar on Marker and Herzog is a very sweet seminar indeed. Thanks for the Disney story. I saw that show maybe three times over the years, and I was always, like, holy fuck, those are the same actors who were doing the show fifteen years ago! Wally Boag is really terrific in those 60s Disney movies like 'Son of Flubber' and 'Absent-Minded Professor'. Great stuff about incomprehension. That was awesome. You were kind of on fire yesterday, B. ** David, Thanks. I have a bead on that film as we speak. ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Man, good luck getting the chaos behind you. Yesterday was crazed for me too, as will be today. Talk to you pronto. ** Memoirs of a Heroinhead, Hey. Wow, Shane, that is so very kind of you. I don't know what to say. I'm all blushed up over here. You are very sweet, my friend. Feel my heavy love. ** Schoolboyerrors, Thanks about the post. That Dinosaur ride did have a Star Warsy vibe and build. Maybe it was those borderline irritatingly drawn illustrations. I did get your email, and opened it this morning, and, man, I am intensely honored, to say the least. I haven't downloaded the file yet, but I will today. Thank you crazily much, D. If you need me or my input or anything in any way re: that, you know, obviously, just ask. Man, wow, thank you! ** Heliotrope, Hi, bud. Glad you evaded the pool. I just googled Le Creuset duth oven and, yeah, nice gift. Couldn't find an aubergine one, but ... dude, suave. You have the craziest friends. The Dodger tickets are sweet. How are they doing? They were doing very poorly for a while, and I got too depressed about that to keep keeping up. Big love to you, big M! ** Ken Baumann, No, thank you! I'm going to try to find a way to watch that episode you noted as being a favorite of yours online. There must be a way. ** Steevee, Well, right, a gung-ho producer. Or some real go-getter lighting or camera guy maybe. Hope the interview goes really well today. Sounds like that's kind of guaranteed. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Great that you're sending zines. I'll make sure they're in a highly visible, seductive spot. Everything good with the new apartment and everything? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey, Jeff. Oh, fuck, about the biopsy. Hopefully it'll just be a pricey test with a happy conclusion. I don't have insurance either, and I have this thing I've needed to get tested for months, and that's a bad, procrastination-inspiring combination. Let me know how it goes, Jeff, and try not to worry, okay? Lots of love to you. ** Sypha, Hey. Oh, the DAII post can be modestly sized, don't worry. You've laid fantastic groundwork, and and #3 could just be an extension, and that would still be great. What do I like about 'Ubik'? Probably that it is so plotty but so wild and crazed and packed with great ideas. It takes amazing advantage of plot and of the strengths of plotting, and that really interests me for one thing. And I like his prose a lot. I don't know, a lot of things, I guess. ** Alfonso, Hey, man! Yeah, I never go back to the earlier posts/ comments once the day changes, so I think I probably never see a bunch of late breaking comments. I would love to see a ghost and believe in them. I envy you. There are supposedly ghosts in the Recollets where I live, but I haven't ever seen a thing that has been out of the ordinary. I'm sorry about your sucky recent weeks and about the reality overtake of the magic with that guy. Yeah, reality, charming, ha ha. The Florence summer should be really nice. I was just there for the first time in my life a couple of months ago. Hugs back to you, my friend. ** Chris Cochrane, Hey, Chris. Things are crazed, but I'm going to try to get to the edit during a break today. Mike Fornatale? Hm, I don't remember his association with Moby Grape. Must have been in one of their later incarnations? Doug Gillard, though, yes, awesome! ** Michael_Karo, Hey. Yeah, Yury has applied for that lottery thing the last two years. Before that, Russians were excluded from participating. It's like the ultimate crapshoot with a severe unlikeliness factor, but he does register for it every year. Given that we have no other options left apart from waiting until he can become a French citizen or some miraculous outreach from someone in the US government, we're working the crumbs of possibilities as best we can. Thanks a lot for mentioning that, man! Take some exotic French love and vibes in return. ** L@rstonovich, Welcome back to here if not to Portland yet, pal. Sounds like a hella sweet trip. A Glenn Ligon Day would be most, most welcome, yes, of course. Gracias. Enjoy the legit Italian place. Is it in what little is left of Little Italy? There are still some seriously Italian places there. ** "Matt', Hey, man. Yeah, good, formatting it in Blogspot style is perfect. Baudrillard is so romantic about LA, wow. LA has been reduced to having but three theme parks now. But it is the Halloween spooky house capitol of the world. Quick update: She's sorry, been busy and constantly on tour, will write to you. Another factor is that our schedule is in flux. The piece we were going to start making this summer got pushed back six months or so, and now we're working on that Festival. Anyway, I'll be seeing her a lot in the next two weeks, so I'll keep on it. ** Jeff, Hey, Jeff! Good to see you! I'm really glad to hear your dad is doing okay. You have a cool mom, that's for sure. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Hey. It rained most of the day. It's raining now, or, wait, it was until about ten minutes ago. I can't sleep on planes, no. Well, I've been known to nod off for ten minutes or so with enough wine, ear plugs, and an extra empty seat on which to recline distortedly. Luckily, my trip to London is by train, and it's only a two hour or slightly less trip. Working out is a good thing, I guess. Yury does, if jogging and swimming count, and I guess they must. I didn't know about that Gorey 'Isis' book. Interesting. I'm going to look for it. I remember 'Once Is Not Enough' being pretty entertaining. My agent is the agent of the Jacqueline Susann estate, so I bet I could get a copy. Was there a movie based on that? I keep thinking there was. Must not have been a camp classic, if it exists. My day: Finished the p.s., took a fast shower, walked/trotted over to Point Ephemere to meet with Gisele. More festival stuff. We have to pick a title for our program and write a description and firm up what we want to do even more. Then Jonathan Capdevielle showed up, and we spent four hours rehearsing the English version of 'Last Spring, a Prequel'. Rehearsing his voice, I mean, 'cos he's doing the robot boy/puppet voices for the English version too. It's hard work because the text is really complicated even in French, and in English it's a real tongue-twister for a non-native English speaker, so the rehearsals were pretty laborious. We realized that the spooky voice he used for the evil puppet in the French version won't work in the English one because, with his accent, it's really hard to understand what he's saying, so we need to find a different spooky voice and soon since we record the voices in a week and a half, and I'll be gone until the weekend. It'll be okay, I guess. Anyway, that was kind of exhausting. Then I came back here, ran some trip-related errands, washed some clothes, wrote some emails, and talked to Thomas Moronic on the phone for the Transductions interview thing mentioned above. I got a Facebook message from this guy who's reviewing the Bob Mould memoir that's coming out. I didn't know about the memoir until he told me. Anyway, I did this piece on Bob Mould for Spin Magazine years ago in which he 'came out', and he ended up freaking out about it afterwards, I guess because he thought he didn't 'come out' in the right way or something, and since then he's been telling people this distorted, untrue story of how that article came about that totally misrepresents me, and I guess he has repeated that untruth in his memoir, and the reviewer guy wanted to get my side of the story, so I called him and told him the true story, and I hope I don't have to end up doing that a lot because, one, it's a drag and, two, it pisses me off that someone who was once my friend is lying/shit-talking about me and, three, I really don't like having to call him out. So, that happened and was kind of annoying. After that, I just chilled with a bit of forgettable TV and went to bed. So, I guess I will tell you about today and tomorrow on Thursday, and I look forward to hearing how your days went. ** Alan, Hey. Last I heard, which was maybe a week and a half ago, Jim hadn't gotten his copy yet. Well, I will give it one last try using a tough love approach. ** Postitbreakup, Hey. Wow, how cool that you paid such close attention. That response, of course, was my dream. God love you. Well, the Ratatouille ride probably makes more sense when you factor in that it's being built at Disneyland Paris. Anyway, yeah, your theme park post love did my heart very good. Thanks, Josh. ** Oscar B, Ha ha ha, talk to/see you in a while! ** Okay. Today you get Christophe Honore, one of my favorite French film directors and, well, my actual director as well since I scored that role in his film 'Homme au Bain'. I hope you like it. I'll give you a post and a hello tomorrow, and I will see you in the usual way on Thursday.