France,
2003, 120 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
-
Emmanuelle Bercot
- prod
-
Frédéric Niedermayer
- scr
-
Emmanuelle Bercot
- cam
-
Crystel Fournier
- editor
-
Julien Leloup
- cast
-
Olivier Guéritée, Emmanuelle Bercot, Kevin Goffette, Rémi Martin, Lou Castel
- source
-
Flach Pyramide International, 5, rue de Chevalier de Saint-George, Paris 75008, France. FAX: 33-1-40-20-05-51. EMAIL: pricher@flach-pyramide.com.
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Emmanuelle Bercot in person.
OTHER
Emmanuelle Bercot attracted attention with her first two shorts Les Vacances (1997) and La Puce (1998). In the latter she told the story of a young teenage girl’s affair with an older man. In Clément, her feature film debut, she reverses that Lolita-like relationship. Marion is a 30-year-old woman, uncomprising and impulsive, who falls in love with Clément, a 12-year-old friend of her godson. Bercot achieves an immediate emotional climate free of pathos or moral judgment by simply chronicling a love story that has until now been taboo on the screen. The games of seduction and tension and, finally, the inevitable dissolution of the relationship are seen with a keen sense of observation that gives them a surprising normalcy. Bercot also achieves a blend of styles. Her shots are firmly framed, while her camera captures with an almost documentary freshness and agility the movements and the feelings of the two protagonists, played by Olivier Guéritée, sensational in his maturity and intelligence, and the director herself (already an accomplished actress with Claude Miller and Bertrand Tavernier) who plays Marion as a hotheaded free spirit whose has not quite left her own teenage years behind.
—Michel Ciment
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
