Léa Domenach: “I made Bernadette to avenge Bernadette Chirac!”
The director returns to the writing, her comedic bias and her choice of Catherine Deneuve in the title role for her first feature film.
What made you want to dedicate a film to Bernadette Chirac?
Léa Domenach : I was immersed in politics with my two journalist parents (Michèle Fitoussi and Nicolas Domenach (who co-wrote with Maurice Szafran A President’s Novel, a biography on Jacques Chirac, Editor’s note) and it has always fascinated me. As for Bernadette Chirac, she is a figure from my childhood. I was born under Mitterrand, so I grew up with the Guignols of the news and this image of a shrew, mistreated and humiliated in sketches which, today, seem incredibly misogynistic.. However, I was never really interested in his life… until I came across the documentary by chance Bernadette, Memoirs of a Free Woman, produced by Anne Barrère who had been his communications advisor. She said everything she thought with a kind of freedom of tone and unstoppable punchlines. Including on extremely intimate subjects like her husband’s infidelity. I realized that deep down I didn’t know much about his life. What it meant to be a woman of that time and in a bourgeois environment who initially only aspired to have a beautiful marriage before wanting much more. As well as how she went from shadow to light. So I rediscovered this woman who had always seemed a little bitter to me, a little old-fashioned but who, deep down, was silently lashing out. I’m not his age, I’m left-wing, feminist, from a different social background. But it spoke to me. And I told myself that if it spoke to me, it could speak to others. I had before me a real comedy character.
BERNADETTE: CATHERINE DENEUVE IMPERIALE (REVIEW)
Why did you want to go into comedy?
Because for me, this queen of punchlines was spontaneously a very strong comedy character. And I wanted through comedy to reverse the balance, to avenge the one who has so often taken the blame. I found it funny to rewrite the story with her in that tone, which I like and in which I spontaneously feel at ease.
Were you not afraid of tipping into hagiography?
I wanted to create a fictional character, to whom we become attached and see the film through his eyes. And for it to work, you have to create empathy for this character. I do it all the more naturally because I’m anything but cynical: I don’t like Succession because I find the characters too mean, for example! (laughs) So yes, I assume I pushed certain sliders. I assume that in my film Bernadette Chirac is much nicer than she must have been in life. And I think that Catherine Deneuve pushed the cursor even further in the emotion she expressed, particularly in the second part of the film. But for all that, I will not speak of hagiography. I will just say that we are tender with her. Without making a film to his glory.
In turn, the character of his daughter Claude, her father’s advisor, can appear harsh. Don’t you find it a little busy in this rather enveloping comedy climate?
Claude Chirac was much more scratched than I do, in many books. What I wanted to tell through her is the trajectory of a teenage girl growing up. Like when I was a teenager myself, I was ashamed that my mother came to pick me up from school, because I found her too old-fashioned. And as legally, we were very careful, there are few things that are not true, that have not already been told. Including this sentence: “it wasn’t easy for me to be the one who wasn’t sick” that she said to her mother, referring to her sister Laurence (stricken with anorexia nervosa after meningitis and who died in 2016, Editor’s note). If you find me a little harsh with her, I think this sentence saves her. It shows that she took it hard even if I don’t really show it in the film.
Did you not hesitate to embark on this project while Bernadette Chirac was still alive?
Actually, I never asked myself this question. Probably because I knew that I wouldn’t do anything disrespectful and because I come from a generation consumed by political Anglo-Saxon films about living people. In fact, this question arose after the writing, during the casting. When actresses told me that it would bother them to play someone alive.
Did you warn the family that you were starting this film?
The wish of my producer, of my distributor, for a legal question, was not to warn the family. Because from the moment we warn them, they can ask to read the script and make the film we had in mind impossible. So we really did Bernadette in our area, quite confidentially. But from the moment the promo started, in July, I told my producers that I didn’t feel comfortable and that I was going to write a letter to Bernadette and Claude to offer them a private screening . That’s what I did.
What led you to Catherine Deneuve to play Bernadette Chirac?
The first time I went into my producers’ offices, I immediately told them Deneuve. They told me to write the script first and we’d see! (laughs) And they weren’t wrong because as a result, I detached myself from an image to write. Then came the time to have the script that we co-wrote with Clémence Dargent say. We sent it to his agent. His first reaction was obviously surprise. But we were lucky that she liked the script. And from our first meeting, I explained to her why I had thought of her: although she does not resemble her physically, they still have in common a fairly haughty bearing, something of the grand bourgeois. And Catherine Deneuve especially has this rapid flow that Bernadette can have when she is mean. This film is a bit like the story of the last queen of France and for me, I couldn’t see who other than Catherine Deneuve to play her!
By Léa Domenach. With Catherine Deneuve, Michel Vuillermoz, Denis Podalydès… Duration: 1h32. Released October 4, 2023
