Patrice Leconte is very troubled that Englishmen cannot tutoies their girlfriends. This is not some French eroticism, but a grammatical formulation denoting intimacy. Although it can carry an erotic charge, as anyone can testify who ever experienced that moment on the banks of the Seine: midnight approaching, one wondering where one stands with one’s new gonzesse … Suddenly she parts her ruby lips and, abandoning the lumbering vous which has stalled the evening, sprays you with a tiny tu.
“It is the moment when one knows one has passed to the other side of the mirror,” Leconte agreed gravely.
His immediate problem is that in his latest film, The Girl on the Bridge, his lovers never get a chance to say tu to each other, a subtle and central Gallic change of status not easily translatable to an English audience. In his sunny, sixth-floor Montparnasse apartment Leconte, a trim, wiry man of 53, explained why tutoiement is precious to him. “In French films nowadays,” he said, “boy meets girl; in five minutes boy is in bed with girl – and they spend the rest of the film arguing. I wanted to make a film where two people desire each other for 90 minutes, but never get into bed.”
Do not jump to the conclusion that The Girl on the Bridge is a Gallic Brief Encounter. While Adèle (Vanessa Paradis) does not have sex with Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), she does it with anything in pantalons. But she really only desires Gabor.
Leconte claims he was trapped by an absurd film convention that lovers cannot tutoyer each other until they have slept together. In polite French films it goes something like this: “Vous are very charming,” he says. “Thank vous,” she says. “Would vous have dinner with me?” “I’d love to, thank vous.” Then: “Would vous like a last drink at my place?” “Willingly!” Cut to next morning and he says: “What are tu doing today?”
“But my characters do make love after the film,” Leconte reassured me, providing an essential insight into the director. He loves films, believes in them and finds himself half-convinced that the stories have an afterlife. Critics have attempted to find some pattern, to his output of 17 features – everything from comedy romps (Les Bronzés) to heartbreaking romances (The Hairdresser’s Husband); from Tango, which gave rise to accusations of misogyny (which he denies); to period pieces with a social conscience, like the Bafta-winning Ridicule. But they have failed to find convincing traces of personal preoccupations – let alone anguish. The surface suggests a watchful, mischievous personality with an explosive capacity, something French film critics have recently discovered.
His films are not an exercise in personal therapy. “The one link,” Leconte said, “is that I adore making films. When you love films to that degree you amuse yourself making all kinds of films.” Like a Hollywood director of the 1930s and 1940s, he can turn his hand to any genre without leaving a personal imprint. As a result, he is only intermittently taken seriously and only attempts intermittently to be serious.
Leconte came to Paris from Tours in 1967 determined to get into film school and become a director. But a year later, the uproar of May 1968 changed everything and the film school collapsed. For five years he was obliged to earn a living contributing to the strip-cartoon magazine, Pilote, then run by Asterix writer René Goscinny.
In France, many people are still defined by what they did or did not do in May 1968. “I was furious,” Leconte said. “I had worked hard at film school and passed exams which were very difficult. Then the students occupied it and the courses stopped. Shit, I said, they have screwed up my career. I know it was a very egotistical reaction and I am not proud of it. But that’s the way it was. Even in my personal life,” he said. “I hate two things: disorder and mobs.”
Despite this, in November, he appeared to be leading a kamikaze war against French film critics. In a letter to leading Paris critics, he railed against their “sadism, arrogance and treachery”.
“Oh, la!” he exclaimed with an air of infinite weariness that this should be dragged up again. “Don’t you think you went too far in calling for a ban on all bad reviews until the weekend after the film went out on public release?”
“I wasn’t responsible for that,” he said. “All those stupidities were written afterwards. Suddenly everyone dived in and it became really merde noir (black shit). At the very beginning I simply say to certain critics – Le Monde, Libération, Cahiers du Cinema – some violent critics, people who are not true lovers of cinema: ‘You have the right to speak well or speak badly [of a film] but not in that manner!’ When you have the impression of being assassinated by critics who have never done anything with their 10 fingers …” (he presented to me the close-up of the double fan of his own toil-worn palms) “and then write violent, malicious trash, I find that inadmissible! This feeling just accumulated in me and one day I said ‘Shit! I’m fed up. Why should I continue to keep my trap shut.’ I really said that very calmly. I just said, ‘Be careful what you write. Be careful!’
“At first I was alone. Then suddenly the critics ‘Wowwowwow!’ ” Leconte barked briefly like a dog. “Then the cinéastes!” This time hounds of deeper register bayed that Leconte was in the right. “They got together. They – Tavernier and others – set up a kind of club, drafted a statement full of stupidities.
“At the beginning I was content to be alone,” he said wistfully. “I had no intention of starting an uprising. I just wanted to relieve my own feelings. But it assumed incredible proportions. Really black shit.”
So it has calmed down? “Ooh, they still write the same crap. But I made a new year’s resolution to never again read critics.”
Do you find that difficult to keep? “Very easy,” he said, with an air of extravagant insouciance. “Colleagues on the production say to me: ‘In Telerama it’s not good’ ‘In Studio it’s excellent’ ‘I saw a good critique here, a bad one there.’ I say: ‘Really? Is that so.’ Fancy that!” And he gave a raspberry. “I just get on with my work.”
The Girl on the Bridge is seriously romantic, but the bizarre plot gives it a grotesque nature too. Daniel Auteuil is an itinerant knife-thrower who accosts women who are about to throw themselves into the Seine and suggests a better way out: he needs someone for target practice. Vanessa Paradis proves to be a gift from Fate. “I like to base a story firmly in reality,” he said. “I would never, for example, make a science-fiction film. But I then take that realistic story and wring its neck.” He is now shooting the story of the saddest girl in the world set in a real funfair at St Cloud in Paris.
Occasional rumoured diversions aside, Leconte’s domestic life appears to have a solid structure. True, he once said, in attempting to justify the apparent misogyny of Tango, that he had often thought of murdering his own wife. But in reality, they have been together for 30 years and have two daughters.
After the sad girl in the funfair, his next project will be another romp. Next January he will begin shooting a film about the closing down of the Paris brothels. It’s a subject that is close to home for Leconte: the most notorious, Madame Claude’s, was just around the corner from his apartment in Montparnasse.
The Girl on the Bridge opens in Johannesburg on Friday