08/03/2023 - The French filmmaker unpicks his 22nd feature film, a sharp period comedy resonating with the modern-day world

A loose adaptation of a 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, The Crime Is Mine [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: François Ozon
film profile] is the 22nd feature film by the talented and prolific François Ozon, who has returned to comedy, cheerfully blending lightness and caustic humour by endowing a 1930s story with Me Too accents. This feminist film is released in French cinemas on 8 March, courtesy of Gaumont.

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Cineuropa: You’ve adapted a number of plays now. Why this predilection and how did you come across this play from 1934?
François Ozon: I find adaptations often serve as a good base for a story because, in general, they involve things I like, although not entirely, so I do transform them. I happened to watch True Confession, a pretty average comedy starring Carole Lombard, but which was adapted from a French play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil called The Crime Is Mine. I was curious to see how the Americans had gone about adapting that French play. So I read it and I found some aspects of it were really funny, with its false-guilty character who incriminates herself in a crime she hasn’t committed and who becomes famous because of this lie. Straight away, I thought the character would have to be an actress, which wasn’t the case at all in the play or in the American film (she was a writer).

So I transformed the play and I did so in a way that it would resonate with modern-day times, with our current concerns, and with my own, too, in terms of the hold men have over women in general. Now that I think of it, it’s actually the third instalment in a trilogy all about the female condition, following on from 8 Women [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Potiche [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. 8 Women was about the rejection of the patriarchy, since the man takes his own life; Potiche was about the arrival of the matriarchy with a woman taking power; and this one is a film about the triumph of the sisterhood, about how women help one another to get by, at a time in the Thirties when women were incredibly oppressed. It was interesting to gain perspective on how things had changed and which fights still remain to be fought so as to achieve total equality and freedom for women.

They’re very serious subjects, which you’re tackling with a screwball comedy.
Yes, and I think that it’s made easier by the fact it’s set in the 1930s. If I’d told this story in a modern setting, it might have been more of a dramatic film, in the spirit of By The Grace of God [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: François Ozon
film profile]. Setting it in the Thirties gives us a little bit of distance. It’s a period that we can idealise and, ultimately, the 1930s Paris which I show is more like the Hollywood-style Paris we see in Lubitsch or Billy Wilder’s films. It’s not realistic, there’s a kind of stylisation which allows us to ask questions and smile about things which we might not be able to laugh about yet in today’s world.

Sincerity within a lie is the film’s main theme. How were you looking to broach this?
The idea was to make a film about a bad actress who becomes a good actress thanks to a big, fat lie. I’ve often explored lies. Film itself is a lie, we act scenes, everyone plays characters, yet viewers go to cinemas in order to believe in it. There’s a desire, a childlike need to believe a story that’s being told to us, even if we know it’s not true. And I also really liked the fact that this actress who isn’t very good, suddenly, thanks to the words written by someone else, her lawyer, comes to embody ideas which she herself identifies with, and a truth comes to light. That’s what I like: that truth is born out of an artifice, from something fabricated. Ultimately, she discovers a political, feminist consciousness and she becomes symbolic of it. She uses this opportunity, and it leads her towards a nobler cause than she originally intended.

How big a role did you want artificiality to play in the film?
I wanted to be open about it from the outset. The film opens onto a theatre curtain and closes with a scene from a play. It was inherent to the subject, in my mind. The idea was to be as if in a film by Renoir: life is a theatre scene, everyone plays a role. The one time Madeleine speaks the truth, she looks into the camera, she looks at the viewer: from the outset, I walk through walls, which you don’t do in realistic films. It’s a game, a pact that I make with viewers: do they agree to enter into this artificial world? That’s something I like about film, even if I do understand that some people are hostile to it and they don’t get on board. But I think viewers are clever and aware enough to accept this kind of artifice and enjoy it.

(Translated from French)