Lunch with La chanson [The Song]

Interview with Tiphaine Raffier, director of La chanson [The Song]

 What is your connection with Marne-la-Vallée?
I grew up in Val d’Europe. This town is built more with signs than with bricks. There are people living in this copy town, it is them I’m interested in. How do you grow up in a town of lies? A town where the first injunction would be “To be happy, consume!”. What do the people look like who never made it out of this sham, this empire of consumption and distraction? When we grow up on a set, do we become fiction? How do you access art in the enchanted Kingdom of Mainstream? I have a peaceful fascination for this place. I find it attractive, and it made my mother very happy.

 What interests you in the documentary images and the observation of the animal world?
Seeing that this real town is a set, I needed real images to enter its fictional realm. It gave more consistency to my four characters: Barbara, Pauline, Jessica and The Town. The animal has two powers in this film. There is the docile or artificial animal that distracts the inhabitants and decorates the town. But the animal also brings about an esthetic acceleration through its beauty and complexity. At the end, the somewhat worrisome shadow of a fish lets us catch a glimpse of the animal world reclaiming its due place from the artifice. But I love the artifice, you know, otherwise I wouldn’t be making films. I’m not fascinated by the authentic, but I’m sometimes shaken up by nature because I can sometimes catch a glimpse of a sort of divinity there. Regarding animal documentaries, I watched quite a few when I was suffering from insomnia (especially when I was in theater school).

 How did you imagine the three characters?
Barbara, Pauline and Jessica don’t question their environment at all. Like big children stuffed into aging bodies, they are subject to eternally resembling the models they were given and to follow the social roles that were pre-established for them: the young eternal woman. I wanted their archetype to talk with those from teen moviesor the models we see on the Disney Channel. Barbara, Pauline and Jessica, each with their own paths and evolution, are separated by contradictory and infinitely more complex desires. They have to choose between fusion and free will, between the precession of models or the creative unknown. In the beginning, Barbara holds the camera, she manages the time and the bodies of her friends. Then it is a veritable revolution that takes place, among this friendly trio and in the city as well.

 Why did you want to explore the subject of musical creation?
It is an old fantasy. I think my absolute dream would have been to be a singer. Because I think it is the simplest and most direct art form. It escapes completely from the rational world. But music is also a very powerful social marker. I may have been traumatized by this question in middle school: “And you, what kind of music do you listen to?”.

 Does technology inspire you in your own creative process?
When I wrote La chanson, I had two or three intuitions. Pauline’s songs had to be interesting. They had to be love songs without words of love. I have always been fascinated by the poetic side of non-literary forms. Cronenberg said, “The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual. Set this mode for taking pictures without people. What author of the past century has produced more provocative and poignant writing than that?” This quote both makes me laugh and converses remarkably with the discourses produced on the history of art. But when I think about it, Val d’Europe is a town-idea. A sort of leaflet that could be entitled “The Idiot’s Guide to European Architecture”. This town is also a guidebook in a way.

 Do you like to attend shows and expositions that allow you to see or use old technological devices?
I love that. My favorite museum is the Arts and Crafts museum in Paris. There is such beauty in innovation. In the imperfection of transitional technologies. The minitel, the telephone booth, the pager. I find they provoke a crazy sense of romanticism, of nostalgia.

 Are there any particular freedoms that the short film format allows you?
No, only constraints. But without constraints there is no freedom. So, yes. I have the feeling that I no longer write the same since I made this film. Conciseness is extremely difficult. It might be the most difficult of all. To make a short is a great art form in a way. I have the feeling that people don’t realize this enough. We should say it more. To make beautiful, rich and short, it is extremely complex. I admire all those directors who have excelled in this field.

La chanson is being shown in National Competition F11.