2024-09-03 21:41:09
Eighty-six-year-old French director Claude Lelouch accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival and introduced his new film. On that occasion, he denied that he would say goodbye to the 51st film called Finalement.
The Parisian native became famous in 1966 with the psychological drama Man and Woman, which was seen by over four million people in France alone, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival and the Oscars for best foreign language title and screenplay. Jean-Louis Trintignant and actress Anouk Aimée played the lead roles in the story of a car racer and a screenwriter, both of whom lost their partners.
Now when the distributor announced that Claude Lelouch called his new product Finalement, translated as At the end or Finally, the French began to speculate whether it was not the end of the work. Claude Lelouch rejected such an interpretation at the Venice festival this week. “Of course I know that I’m making my last films, that’s why I called this one Finally. But I’ll make another one after it and it will be called: In the end, nothing ends,” he joked.
“And now seriously. As long as I have ideas, I want to keep doing this work. And now I have so many ideas that I honestly can’t wait until we start shooting the next film next year,” he announces.
Finalement is a comedy drama about a lawyer who suddenly loses the ability to lie, so he decides to walk across France. Along the way, he searches for something like the meaning of life. The protagonist was played by the 60-year-old Algerian comedian Kad Merad, and actresses Elsa Zylberstein and Sandrine Bonnaire and singer Barbara Pravi also appear in the new film.
The Venice Film Festival presents this film out of competition. This year, Lelouch also received the Glory to the Filmmaker Award, which the organizers give for lifetime achievement. Previous laureates include directors Ridley Scott, Brian De Palma, Spike Lee and Abbas Kiarostami. “Life is like a race. You have to add to the end, not slow down,” Lelouch declared at the ceremony.
The lawyer in Lelouch’s new film was portrayed by Kad Merad. | Photo: Studiocanal
The respected French filmmaker is self-taught, he never studied cinematography. His father bought him his first camera when he was ten years old, and he learned to use it himself. The film is said to have saved his life. “During the war, my mother hid me in cinemas because that was the only place where the Nazis weren’t looking for Jews,” he recalled.
He started shooting documentaries as a high school student. As a cameraman, he drew attention to himself in the late 1950s with documentaries about the USSR and the USA. “I was the first person from the West who secretly managed to shoot footage from the Moscow mausoleum with Lenin and even with Stalin in 1957. I made a lot of money from it, so then I could start shooting my own films,” he said.
He released his first feature films in the 1960s. He was sometimes referred to as a member of the so-called French New Wave, along with the no longer alive François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol or Jean-Luc Godard. However, he himself never felt part of it and still distances himself from the label.
He experienced the greatest fame in the 60s and 70s of the last century on the wave of interest in Man and Woman. Later works had a downward trend, according to critics. Nevertheless, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Annie Girardot or Johnny Hallyday acted in his films.
In 2006, Lelouch visited Prague’s Febiofest, where he received the Kristián award. On that occasion, he recalled, among other things, the filming of Man and Woman. “I already felt during filming that something special was happening. I could not have expected that the film would receive the Palme d’Or, two Oscars and be played all over the world, but I felt that this was the story that people needed right now,” he said, how he shot the picture very quickly. “All I needed was three weeks and a hundred thousand dollars,” he remarked.
Claude Lelouch even returned to this story twice later. First in 1986, when he released a sequel called Man and Woman After Twenty Years, and the second time in 2019 with a drama called The Best Years of One Life. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée reprise the lead roles in both.
“I want to show with this film that life is stronger than death,” the director said at the time. The second film was the last for both protagonists. Trintignant died the year before last, Anouk Aimée passed away the month before last.
Czechs may also know Claude Lelouche thanks to the fact that in 1972, together with Miloš Forman and other creators, he participated in a sports collage from the then Munich Olympics called Viděno osmi. Forman contributed to it with the film Decathlon, in which, thanks to the montage, he had the athletes perform under the baton of the conductor Karl Böhm, accompanied, among other things, by Beethoven’s Ninth and Bavarian folklore.
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“The willingness to take risks and stand up to the stronger? Should be of interest to anyone with a basic moral code,” said actor Martin Hofmann on Spotlight. | Video: Team Spotlight