Tea time with Des racines

Interview with Jeanne Traon-Loiseleux, director of Des racines

In Des racines, you address the passage into the new life of retirement. Why were you interested in this period of life in particular, and do you want to explore this theme again in future films?

I chose as my main character a man entering retirement. It’s true that it’s a strange choice, because as a 23-year-old woman, his life is a far cry from mine. I think I needed this distance to express personal things. Out of modesty? Perhaps a little, but also in taking this different view, I had the impression of more accurately defining my character than if we had been the same age. But for my second film, it will be different. I want to try other things.

How did you come up with the idea to add the dimension of the immigrant identity? Did you do research on the retirement of actual immigrants?

I did not “add a dimension of immigrant identity” to my character because this is where I started, from the feeling of being uprooted from one place and at the same time being rooted almost despite oneself in another. Prior to filming, I did some research in the town of Saint-Claude where I gathered the accounts of first and second generation Italian immigrants. Their different stories became entwined with my own family history to construct my main character. The age of retirement is something else, it’s a moment of indecision and then a tipping point. What interested me about this period in life was this state of incertitude that gave Angelo the time to lose himself in dreams of a faraway Italy to rediscover. My character often finds himself between two worlds.

What do you think of French people who go to retire in Italy or in Spain?

I don’t really have an opinion, I’m not really concerned by this. In any case, Des racines is not the story of a retiree who wonders if he could spend his remaining days sunbathing in a Club Med in Sicily. On the contrary, the Italy my character dreams of is not a well thought out project – it is a fantasy, reawakened by a painting, or hearing a film by Nanni Moretti, or by family memories. In fact, it is a universe that Angelo keeps to himself. Through this secret nostalgia, we see something of childhood, unattainable dreams that we nurture in a secret garden.

What would it have changed if you had placed your character in a big city instead of a more rural setting like this one?

What interested me about this mountain town was the topography of the different places: old buildings attached to the sides of cliffs, bridges that stretch forever between two distant banks, the encapsulation of the town and the surrounding mountains that prevent the sunlight from penetrating in winter. It’s a strange and fascinating town that is like a character in itself in my film. From the beginning, I wrote for that setting and no other. The choice of actors came afterwards.

In Des racines you show that quiet is not always a synonym for serenity. Did you make this film as a quest towards inner peace?

I don’t think that a concept as abstract as a quest for inner peace is part of the script. But that does indeed define the evolution of my character who rids himself little by little of the obsessive dream in order to live life to the fullest with the people that surround him. The original idea was rooted in the title’s homophony between “Des racines” (roots) and “Déracine” (uproot). The story of a man who believes he is uprooted but who roots himself, despite himself, in another land.

In Des racines, you manage to juggle between solidarity and solitude, through shared, supportive moments of life where the main character, although active, displays a certain poignant recoil. How did you create this duality?

Indeed, this is a point I really worked on in order to achieve a cohabitation in my character of intimate nostalgia with an opposing social context, one that is based on friendship, love and warmth. Angelo is not an isolated man, he is an introverted man, there is an important difference. Solitude is internal and is perhaps even more profound because there are no obvious causes. It is important for me that this man has friends, a girlfriend, that he goes out to the museum, the cinema, the cafe, that he has a connection with the world in which he lives. It is these supportive connections, even the less significant ones (I think about the exchange with the neighbor in the stairway) which save him from pathos and nostalgia and return him in the end to life.

You don’t show in Des racines if the main character has children. Were you not interested in the subject of the “second generation”?

Angelo doesn’t have children, but he is already from the “second generation” of Italian immigrants seeing that he was not born in Italy (in fact, he speaks very poor Italian). His parents are dead and he is not married as he has a girlfriend. I found that more original than to get into family presentations, because what interested me were the relationships he had built on his own. For example, Pierrot, interpreted by Robinson Stévenin, is almost like an adopted son to him. There’s also Maryse, Sarah and friends who surround him. These are more his roots than distant Italian relatives who no longer know him.

In fact, we don’t see many children. For you, where are they?

In certain personality traits of my characters? Angelo’s ability to plunge into his imagination, Pierrot’s candid, amorous side..

In Des racines, you also address the principle of attachment. Your main character doesn’t seem to have but one deep relationship whereas his other relationships seem superficial. Why did you create this effect of detachment?

I don’t think that Angelo has only one deep relationship. It simply that it’s Pierrot who takes his place at the garage, and it was important to film the changing of hands which is a symbolically strong moment. I also find that the relationship between Angelo and Maryse expresses a strong link between the two of them, even if it is only shown in the scene in the second-hand shop where they discreetly sneak away into the rows of clothing. If I had made a feature-length film, I would have developed these different attachments further to achieve a more choral film.

Do you think short film is effective in questioning the meaning of family and of “macro” social units?

The short film isn’t, a priori, the easiest length to address the big themes like family or society. But I don’t think the short film is limited to superficial themes nor is the feature-length film destined to profound themes. In my opinion, a short film that has the amplitude of a long film is one that has succeeded in making felt the passing time, not in its outside length, but its interior duration. It is making the viewer feel a space and a time that is larger than what is actually shown. In this case, we can address the family unit and the larger social unit in a short amount of time. To me, it is a fascinating job to try to dispose of elements that evoke more than what they actually show or say, which give the viewer room for his imagination. At that moment, we begin to ask fundamental questions about cinema because we are now beyond that which is merely visible, beyond a story that simply exposes elements in order to bring the film to a more or less expected ending.

Des racines was either produced, co-produced or self-financed with French funds. Did you write the film with this “French” aspect in mind: in building the film’s context or in questioning certain notions?

No, I didn’t set out to create a typically French film. In fact, when I was writing the film I had in mind the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a Turkish filmmaker who I greatly admire.

Des racines is being shown in National Competition F6.