A Film by André Téchiné

ARP Sélection presents GOLDEN YEARS a film by André Téchiné France / 2017 / 103’ / 1:85 / 5.1 / French INTERNATIONAL PUBLICITY International Press WOLF Consultants T: +49 157 7474 9724 (in Cannes) M: +33 7 60 21 57 76 [email protected] DOWNLOAD PRESS MATERIALS at: www.wolf-con.com/download International Sales Celluloid Dreams 2 rue Turgot - 75009 Paris T +33 1 49 70 03 70 www.celluloid-dreams.com The true love story of Paul and Louise who get married on the eve of WWI. Injured, Paul deserts. Louise decides to hide him dressed as a woman. He soon becomes “Suzanne” a Parisian celebrity in the Roaring 20’s. When granted amnesty, he is challenged to live as a man again. A Dream Come True for Historians by Fabrice Virgili and Danièle Voldman While doing some scholarly work at the Paris police archives, we stumbled across the extraor- dinary story of Paul and Louise, two young people who fell in love in early twentieth-century Paris. When war was declared in July 1914, Paul was mobilized and sent to the front. What then followed was, to say the least, a baroque adventure that could not help but interest André Téchiné, who in 1976 directed the intriguing Barocco. The couple found separation difficult, and Paul could not take the fighting, horror and carnage. Wounded, he deserted and escaped back to Louise. And thus began their ‘golden’ years, escaping the military authorities who were hunting down failed patriots. Paul the deserter disguised himself as a woman and, for ten years, until a general amnesty was declared, Paul became Suzanne and lived as a flapper with Louise. Our first thrill as historians was finding enough material to reconstruct their story. Despite the photos and excerpts from Paul and Louise’s private diaries, the characters remained creatures of paper and print, and our information was spotty. Unlike novel or film writers, historians cannot invent things to compensate for the absence of proven facts. Their job is to approach and understand what truly happened as closely as possible. But thanks to the magic of moving pictures, to a director, to actors, costume designers, and makeup artists, Paul, Suzanne and Louise have come back to life and are once again beings of flesh and blood. They live again, as we watch their golden years until their tragic end breaks our hearts, in a dream come true for historians and, we hope, for viewers as well. André Téchiné Director Interview When did you first discover the story of Paul Grappe? When Michèle and Laurent Pétin gave me the book “La garçonne et l’assassin”. It was the offbeat nature of the story that bowled me over. When reading it, it was the baroque aspect of this amazing story that appealed to me. The story was so mad, that we needed to include the word “folle” in the title (French: Nos Années Folles). And it was based on a true story. Which is absolutely exciting for a film project. Afterwards, I worked with Cédric Anger to disengage the threads that I thought were the most interesting in what was otherwise documentary material: most importantly, the creation and birth of Suzanne, out of the deserter Paul, who is hiding out with his wife, Louise. Creating Suzanne would transform their lives and their conjugal relationship entirely. That is the beginning of a unique adventure the couple embarks on. They will continue on into the unknown. This is not a biopic about Paul Grappe, it is a biopic about a couple that gives birth to Suzanne, as if giving birth to a child. Because Suzanne is a true third character. At first she seems to be a trinket, a fairy tale creature, magical, iconic, enchanted. But little by little she turns into a monster. Cédric and I tried to set her up in opposition to a real baby at the very end. The child’s arrival represents a return to reality. Suzanne’s mystification can work only so long as there are two of them… Paul and Louise create Suzanne together. Her creation is at first a breath of fresh air, she brings them a burst of freedom. The character Louise then becomes upset with Suzanne’s behavior. She watches their dreams of emancipation degenerate into debauch and prostitution. She becomes deeply troubled, disturbed. That is something I really wanted to come across in the scenes: how Suzanne’s transformation transformed their love. For financial reasons, your producers asked you to tweak the screenplay. Why did you fragment the timeline in this new version of the story? From the first, I wanted to stay away from period drama, or a reenactment. Because it costs too much, for one thing, but in any event that is not what I was interested in. I was interested in what the characters were experiencing, what they were living through, and what was going on inside of them. That is what I wanted to show. Creating Suzanne, which at first was simply meant to hide the deserter Paul, had nothing at all to do with fantasies of femininity. This is not about a man who suddenly wants to become a woman, or to disguise himself as a woman. Not at all. He is actually reluctant about cross-dressing. It is Louise who takes the initiative, in order to conceal him, to help and rescue him, as she believes. Only then do questions about reality, deceit, illusion, and trickery arise, and develop into the trauma the characters are going through. We are in a world of concrete masquerade. It was that notion of masquerade that inspired the cabaret act: it majestically sublimates Paul Grappe’s life and fate – as Susanne, At the same time, it got me out of naturalistic reenactments. Because suddenly whatever was historically related to the era, and more crucially to the war – because this story took place because of the war - was smashed to bits. And so our fragmented, splintered and scattered structure has its origin in the war. It was because of the war that everything began to go haywire and fall apart. Before the war, the film proceeds chronologically, and then long after the war, with the birth of a child, everything again becomes chronological. But in between, time bursts its seams. Suzanne is an offspring of war. That is why the almost fantastical scene in which Suzanne meets the mutilated veteran in the Bois de Boulogne was so important to me. There is a mirror effect at play there, because both characters have been disfigured by the war, but differently. The character of the Count represents a third aspect of war. There I imagined a vision and approach that are the polar opposites of Paul Grappe’s. Paul represents the fear of war. The Count had the opposite experience at the front. I had read a text by Teilhard de Chardin entitled “La nostalgie du front”. I used it as is in the film. Teilhard de Chardin illustrates the patriotic extremism of the era, a kind of exacerbated nationalism: a mystique in which you abandon your own self to melt into the nation. The Count is obsessed with death, glory, heroism. He embodies them in his dandy attire and aimless idleness, and transfers his thirst for grandeur onto Louise. But the militarist is not a conservative. He is not at all a Germanophobe. He loves German Romantic music. He plays the clarinet. He is a jazz connoisseur. He is open–minded and morally emancipated. He is a sensualist and party beast. He likes to mix social classes. But that would all have come to naught without Grégoire. He did a tremendous job on the character’s elocution, pronunciation, and speech patterns. He doesn’t speak, he sings. He moves stiffly with a slight limp. With his affected voice and officer’s bearing, his dark and smoldering looks, he used every element of the character’s physical appearance to construct a strange Prince Charming… Quite early on, you did wig and makeup tests with Pierre Deladonchamps… I needed to try out the masquerade effects that were an integral part of the subject. We did several sittings with wigs and make up. As we went along, I realized that we would have to see the character Paul go through the same hit and miss attempts. We show the entire process in the film. We sit in on his successive transformations, corrections, errors, and mistakes. Once I showed the entire transformation process, it became credible, interesting, and real. I also insisted on scenes without a wig, in which Paul’s femininity has nothing to do with a ’prosthesis’. And I think that the passages in which he is Suzanne without the wig are particularly troubling, when he is in a kind of limbo, at a kind of indiscernible frontier between Paul and Suzanne. There, in that sort of hesitancy, is where you find the greatest space for freedom. And that is what is most interesting in cinematographic terms. Pierre understood that very well. I obviously never explained anything in those terms. I am not at all one to delve into the psychology of my characters, or to lecture actors. But Pierre understood that and, more importantly, he put up no resistance. He was inventive at the right moment, and was able to appropriate it all. The transformation per se told him that Paul Grappe finds a space of freedom when he evolves into Suzanne, but that society mirrors back the reflection of a marionette. Pierre was very good at putting that across, but it was never the whole picture.

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