Lunch with Ève
Interview with Agathe Riedinger, director of Ève
Why did you decide to use digital off-camera voices?
Ève and Lili are alpha females. Two women who’ve shaped their ideal of beauty, who’ve taken control of a divine power in order to become physically perfect. I’m fascinated by the women and men who physically recreate their beauty, who subject their bodies to rigorous overhaul in order to achieve perfection. Plastic surgery is sometimes perceived as negating what nature has given us, as an effort to resemble the gods. The body becomes a suit of armor sending out a message of strength when it really only makes the desire (the need) to be loved all the more visible. That paradox moves me, there is a poetic, very human side to such an act. And I wanted to place the paradox in the romantic, and therefore very vibrant, content of what the characters recount, and their way of doing it – digital, plastic, smooth (an alpha way?). Trying to show poetry where there is no fundamental warmth.
Why were you interested in pairing the expression of a desire of love or of attentive social exchanges with the isolation and immobility of the character who expresses that desire?
Their need to be loved paralyzes and therefore isolates them. That feeling is the most humble and the most tyrannical.
To what degree are Ève and Lili female representations of Camus’ Caligula, at once enclosing themselves in a fantasy quest and escaping from reality?
Caligula was a megalomaniacal emperor obsessed with the impossible. Ève and Lili are a female representation of him through their desire for the absolute and their way of expressing that desire, queens of a realm of “too much” that is destined to be imposing. They are a radical representation of desire, of what is most admirable and most powerful. Ève and Lili are also an illustration of it. Their need for love and all their sacrifices are a form of logical submission to the tyranny of more and more.
Why did you want to use dominant colors, pink for Ève and yellow for Lili?
For each one, I worked radically on the artistic direction. The simplicity of the visual vocabulary is a response to the complexity of the topics addressed, topics that in fact require nuance. So imposing a dominant color translated the characters’ obsessions. About beauty and love, their isolation. It’s fetishism.
Have you discovered any advantages that the short film form provides?
Absolutely! Especially on this film with experimental language. The very stripped-down editing and action, the rhythm, the use of digital voices are tools that could be complicated to use in a fictional feature film.
