Alicia G. Arribas |
Madrid (EFE).- Marion Cotillard has just premiered in Spanish theaters her latest film, “Family Affairs”, directed by Arnaud Desplechin, where once again the Frenchman addresses the hatred between two brothers to talk about life, inner growth and , by the way, of the damage that competitiveness between two children can do.
This is at least how the Parisian actress sees it, who assures in an interview with EFE that, although some parents think that putting their children to compete is fine because it prepares them for a competitive world, “that causes a lot of pain, and that pain,” he warns – can end up transformed into hate.
Cotillard (Paris, 1975) -who was the first Frenchwoman to win an Oscar for best leading actress for “La Vie En Rose: Edith Piaf” (2008)-, and her co-star Melvil Poupaud, do a spectacular job in this film , which is told through his pain and his inability to communicate, and in the harsh scenes of reproaches as well as in the childishness of some encounters.
Like the tremendous scene with which the film begins: Alice (Cotillard) and her husband go to the house of her brother Louis (Poupaud) to offer their condolences on the death of their six-year-old son. But Louis lashes out at her sister and throws her out of her house. Five years later, their parents suffer a terrible car accident. It seems inevitable that they will have to talk to each other again.
Both are two renowned artists, Alice, an actress, and Louis, a writer and poet.
“Alice is a woman who, since she was little, feels very close to her brother, with a very intimate relationship, but she couldn’t stand that he became famous when she was ‘the’ famous, and that contradictory love ends up turning into hate, and that Hate is the only way they have to build themselves, one and the other”, explains the protagonist of “Of Rust and Bone” (2012).
The actress explains that Louis, in his books, shows that his parents, “without bad intentions, always made them compete with each other, to compare them, and this is very destructive. If in your own family you have no entity but they look at you through the other and compare you, a monster ends up being born ”.
For Cotillard, “it is a fact that Desplechin makes very intimate films, that he has his own story to tell and that in this film he does so with this fiction, it is not autobiographical at all. He had already explored the hatred between brothers in films like ‘A Christmas Carol’ (2008), and I think that it is in the very exploration of the subject where he finds liberation”, he points out.
Tormented characters and future plans as a director
Although she plays a funny Cleopatra in the latest family comedy “Asterix and Obelix and the Middle Kingdom”, still in theaters, Cotillard acknowledges that her thing is “characters who are tormented and struggling people trying to understand why they can’t get a little of light, in that torment there is something that interests me a lot”, he shares.
There is too long a list of directors with whom she would like to work to reach the zenith of her best role, she says, but “someday” she will be the one to direct: “I would like to direct actors and try to understand the actor from the outside, I don’t know if I will do it in cinema or theater, not even if I will do it soon, but I know that I will end up doing it”.
He says he hasn’t learned much from Alice’s character, if anything it has confirmed “things he already knew, like if one is built from frustration and hatred and doesn’t manage to explore these feelings in order to clean them up, then you you become a tormented and toxic person for yourself and for others”.
Cotillard, neither a feminist nor an environmentalist: against labels
“The #MeToo movement came from the actresses, it is true, but it has been expanding through all sectors of society. It is a necessary revolution and there is still a long way to go, but I am very happy that women are beginning to stop being subservient, that they are not assaulted and that they are not seen as sexual objects. But there is a long way to go, ”she warns.
She does not like the label “feminist” applied to her, nor does she define herself as an environmentalist, because “any label” seems “reducing” to her.
“What I can say is that I feel a deep love for women, that I need to fight with them to get their fundamental rights and that there are things in particular that revolt me”, such as that “at this point there is inequality in wages between men and women”.
