Night cap with Olga

Interview with Maxime Bruneel, director of Olga

 What interested you about the opening sequence in the bathtub? Were you deliberately trying to create a misunderstanding?
Indeed, deliberate misunderstanding was intended. It was important for me to open the film with a kind of prologue detached from the rest of the story. This way, the ambiguous relationship could be depicted without immediately showing how the characters are connected.

 How did you work on the image and the relationship Olga has to her body?
I wanted a particular mood, with a sticky apartment where it’s really hot. I wanted to close the film off in a sort of aquarium where sexuality is overflowing.
“Tropical Torpor” was our theme. The cinematographer Luis Arteaga helped me enormously, starting at the scriptwriting phase, with how to treat the image in the film. We chose to set this story at a time before cellphones and computers. It’s a Latin-American setting from the 1970’s, even though the characters speak French.
We wanted very sexual characters and the tension between all of them comes from their libido. We wanted to see the skin and find camera placements that express that feeling, as, for instance, the way a woman lies on her belly when she sleeps, which makes her look like a body without a head.

 In Olga, you show the violence of intimate relationships. Was it a way for you to create tension in the film, or was it the actual subject of the film?
The subject of the film is violence. What interested me as a starting point was this idea: one usually thinks of the family as representing security. But it’s a backdrop that is also suitable for silent and devastating violence.

 Did you do research about rivalry for affection as it is shown in Olga or was it based on something observed or lived through yourself?
The desire to write this film came from my personal experience. But the competitiveness between these two women takes a sideways path rather than being shown head-on. It is definied by the similarity between the type of men Olga sees and the man her son has grown up to become. Her daughter-in-law comes from this same system and resembles Olga, like an mirror. She is what Olga once was, and she is a reminder of what Olga has lost in all these years.

 Finally, why film a mother-son relationship rather than father-daugther, father-son, mother-dauther or between a brother and sister?
I lived through a situation that was hard to understand and I wrote the film as an exploration of a troubled relationship between a mother and her son. While working with the actors and crew of this film, I noticed a certain universality about this subject, and that motivated me to bring this project to completion.  But I love family portraits. There’s the picture frame, and then there’s the reality. If this film is the mother, I would very much like to do « Father », « Brother » and « Sister ».

 Any cinematic coups de cœur in the past year you’d like to tell us about?
El Club by Pablo Larrain and 45 years by Andrew Haigh. I also loved seeing Kramer vs. Kramer again.

 If you’ve already been to Clermont-Ferrand, could you share with us an anecdote from the festival? If not, what are your expectations for this year?
Clermont will be the second time the film is shown publicly, after Angers on January 25th. I can’t wait to get the audience’s impressions and to share this story with a wide variety of viewers.

Olga is being shown in National Competition F6.