Alice's Odyssey

FIDELIO ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUCIE BORLETEAU FIDÉLIO, ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUC I E BORLE T EAU 2 _ SYNOPSIS _ Alice is a 30 years old sailor, in love but unmarried. She might have heard this song travelling overseas : “Ship is my home Duty is my mife Sea is my country Then who is my wife?” FIDÉLIO, ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUC I E BORLE T EAU 3 FIDÉLIO, ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUC I E BORLE T EAU 4 _ _ INTERVIEW What was the starting point for the film? !e idea for the film came to me because I had a very close WITH THE DIRECTOR friend who decided to enroll in the Merchant Marine Academy at the same time I was starting my cinema studies. For years, I dreamt of the film I could make about her exciting life. For a long time I thought I’d make a documentary. I met men and women who sail or had sailed and listened to them talk about their job, the world, the joys and perils of harmonizing life on the sea with a love life. !en I started writing a fictional story. I wrote the first version on a container ship. I was the only passenger, the only woman and the only French person on board, and the two week trip involved nine days on the open sea. !e secondary characters came to life before my eyes and were woven into the story from the beginning. Certain situations too. After two years working with screenwriter Clara Bourreau, everything had been filtered, encoded and mixed together to the point where today we no longer know what comes from my friend, the people I met, literature or our imaginations. What was it like shooting on the ship? !e biggest challenge we faced in getting this film made was figuring out how to shoot it on a cargo ship. I knew from the get-go I didn’t want to shoot in a studio. !e “real” setting of a merchant marine ship, particularly the engine room, provides _ powerful sensations. I knew these very real sensations would be a plus for the actors, but also a challenge for the whole crew. !e constraints – cramped spaces; severely reduced lighting “Historically, the discourse of absence is held by Woman: possibilities on deck at night; the wild, untamable sound of Woman is sedentary, Man is a hunter, a !aveler; the wind and the even wilder sounds in the engine room – Woman is faith"l (she waits), provided fertile ground for dramatization. Man roams (he sails, he !awls). » After extensive research, we were fortunate enough to find a ship that corresponded to what I was looking for: a vessel the R"#$%& B$'()*+ – A Lover’s Discourse: Fra#ents same age as the Fidelio (20 to 30 years old), still in operation, FIDÉLIO, ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUC I E BORLE T EAU 5 with a lived-in feeling, a patina, a soul. All the boat scenes were shot on board, during sea crossings that lasted several days when necessary. We lived and worked in close collaboration with the sailors, from the ship’s electrician, who joined our crew, to the captain. !e two crews were fascinated with each other, and for the actors it was a real luxury to be able to ask the sailors their questions directly to flesh out their characters! How did you find Ariane Labed, Melvil Poupaud and Anders Danielsen Lie? I’d seen Ariane Labed in A$enberg a year earlier and thought of her as a potential Alice. When she came down to the engine room in her work clothes for the screen tests, I was holding the camera and it immediately became clear to me: I wanted to film her, the way one wants to paint someone’s portrait. So there was my desire, and there was her mystery, thirds of the film. I wanted someone with strong charisma, her talent, her lean lines and soulful eyes, her voice, and her but di,erent from Gaël. I searched for a long time, but here shoulders, which were broad like the sailor woman I’d dreamt again, it became immediately clear to me when I learned that of, feminine and sensual, e,ortlessly working in a virile Anders Danielsen, who had blown me away in Oslo, Au%st profession and a masculine environment. 31st, was interested in the project. His screen tests with Ariane Melvil Poupaud was the dream of a teenage cinephile. Gaël were decisive. !e fact that he has an accent operates an is like a distant cousin of Gaspard in A Summer’s Tale, leaving immediate charm, there’s an otherness about him. I told him the beaches of Brittany to set sail on the open ocean. !e role jokingly, “You’re my Anna Karina!” of captain fits him like a glove. !e relationship between Ariane and Melvil injects romance and drama into the realistic material of the script. For the role Do you consider the ship a character too? of Félix, the lover who stays behind, I needed an actor who !e Fidelio is of course also a character that I examine would make a strong and immediate impact, because after a throughout the film. It has a destiny. When sailors talk about brief appearance, the audience doesn’t see him again for two- their ship, they often refer to it like they would a person. FIDÉLIO, ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUC I E BORLE T EAU 6 !e freighter also interested me as a microcosm that be tamed. Filming the work itself allowed us to illustrate experienced globalization before all other workplaces. When the solidarity between people united against the opposing we cast the crew members, we took into account the diversity forces of the sea and the engine, despite major di,erences in of nationalities working in the profession and also the wide their backgrounds and languages, and also, despite a certain variety of social backgrounds and experience - most of the racism that is more or less conscious. o-cers have had higher education, sailors are not all gru, A sailor’s life is unique in the sense that you never leave and weathered. your workplace, so group interactions and privacy coexist In addition, time stands still at sea. Travel time is on board. French sailors embark for 3 months at a time, disconnected from the immediacy we’re used to. Romanians 4 months, and Filipinos up to 9 months without From the point of view of the love story, the ship is a confined going home! Life on board - meals taken together, parties that space that changes along with Alice’s emotions from a continue even during stopovers, boredom, periods of rest - all paradise to a hell. In the middle of the film, everything seems these details help highlight Alice’s private moments. perfect and ideal on board, but when she re-embarks after having seen Félix again in France, everything goes wrong. In this unique place there is desire, love, death. !us, life. The film explores desire. How did you approach the sex scenes? You chose to film this confined space in CinemaScope. To create a contrast with the group activities, with “public” It was above all the perfect format to film the sea and the life, I wanted to film head-on the things that are not meant to formidable engine room, and curiously, it was also perfect for be seen: sex, intimacy. the narrow confines of the ship, its corridors and cabins. !e Actually there are very few explicit sex scenes in Fidelio, and wide screen format accentuates a feeling of claustrophobia. this was already true in the script. I’m more interested in CinemaScope was also very useful for group scenes in filming bodies communicating, or being silent, just before, or confined spaces where we couldn’t do much cutting, as well just after. Desire as it blooms, love igniting or reigniting. as scenes involving the couple, as it allowed us to avoid using It was important to me that all these scenes convey a mood of shot reverse shots, especially during their confrontations. In joy, pleasure and simplicity. Ariane and I found it amusing to addition to co-ns and snakes, CinemaScope is the perfect imagine Alice “getting o,” in a variety of ways, according to format for filming a woman sleeping or lying down! the scene. It was always important to me that there be joy and vitality The film takes inspiration from the lives of sailors. in the sex. It’s never morbid or dangerous. And when Alice is What did you find interesting about filming them faced with a man who wants to force her, she prevails. at work? In filming the work of a mechanic, we were documenting A dead man’s ship’s diary, found in her cabin, a job that is not widely known and is fairly impenetrable – accompanies Alice throughout her personal odyssey. though precious information from my sailor friend made it Alice arrives on the Fidelio in a ghostly mist, and the voice of possible for us to create a credible technical plot. We were a dead man guides her on her inner journey. !is parallel plot also filming potential danger – the engine as wild beast to of Le Gall’s ship’s diary came late in the writing process - the FIDÉLIO, ALICE’S ODYSSEY A FILM BY LUC I E BORLE T EAU 7 missing piece of a puzzle that would add another dimension If the subtitle “odyssey” has followed me like a talisman since to the script in the form of a chronicle.

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