SEXUALITY INFLAMES MYRIAM MEZIERES’ HEART

With Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard among the frustrating guest cancellations, the 11th Montreal World Film Festival, which concluded last week, was puttering to a halt--until Myriam Mezieres came along.

Declaring that “I am on the side of life in the sun!,” the buoyant French actress-screenwriter of Swiss director Alain Tanner’s sure-to-be-controversial “A Flame in My Heart” jogged up the aisle in her clinging microskirt after introducing the film for its North American premiere. Afterward, she transformed a formal press conference into a zany affair by turning the tables on a French male journalist asking her intimate sexual questions.

“Do you masturbate,” she teased the newspaperman, “when your loved one goes away?”

He blushed and giggled, and she laughed. After all, that’s what Mezieres does brazenly on screen in “A Flame in My Heart” when she grows lonely for her journalist boyfriend who’s away on a two-week assignment--much too long!

Mezieres’ vivid autobiographical story (“75% of the script is close to my life”) tells of an actress, Mercedes, who lives for amour above all. Every day.

“A world without passion is a dead one,” Mezieres asserted. So it follows that “A Flame in My Heart” abounds in scenes of uninhibited sexuality. It tests the boundaries of what is allowed in a non-pornographic film, beginning with what Mezieres calls “the famous masturbation scene.”

Those boundaries are being tested this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, to be followed by the Toronto Festival later this month.

“The love scenes were made in a joyous atmosphere,” Mezieres explained. “In life, I’m shy. I’m not a liberated woman in the way of the stereotype Swedish blonde. Things are more complicated. But when I’m in front of a camera, something happens! In 1987, people still make love by turning off the light in the bedroom. What I try to do, and I’m not sure I succeed, is not to turn off the light in the bedroom of my life.”

Never before has Alain Tanner, the cerebral director of such art-house classics as “La Salamandre” (1971) and “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), made a film so obsessive about passion and sexuality. “A Flame in My Heart” is in a continuum with Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” Oshima’s “In the Realm of the Senses” and Bellocchio’s “The Devil in the Flesh”--films that, in Mezieres’ words, try to pass beyond “artistic ellipses and avoidance of problematic sexual issues.”

Perhaps “A Flame in My Heart” is the most revolutionary for being the first of these ground-breaking works to build from a woman’s perspective about sexuality. Though Tanner directed, he has stated unequivocally, “This is Myriam’s film.” Her philosophy. Her life.

Furthermore, “Women in the audience love the film!” Mezieres asserted at Montreal, sitting down for her first English-language interview ever.

Mezieres said: “In Europe, where the film has played since June, women understand that the movie is a real thing from my heart. My character, Mercedes, wants to dedicate her life to love, other women don’t, that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to be a dream factory for their lovers, even if they don’t say it aloud. In 1987, women seem to be quite lucid about men, love and work, but they still have the romantic need. That contradiction makes them so moving.”

Mezieres conceded that some people are repeled by “A Flame in My Heart” and have accused her of exhibitionism.

“I always ask them, ‘Explain. Tell me more.’ But they can’t go further than that word. On the other hand, one guy who adored the film sent me his writings printed in a limited edition of 100 copies: Really hot porno! It made me laugh, because you’re loved for false reasons.”

Mezieres made a clear distinction between “A Flame in My Heart” and hard-core pornography, which she characterizes as “cold naturalism” without mystery and complexity, and “with your nose too close to the real thing.” Her collaboration with Tanner also is conceived in opposition to soft-core porn, which caters to the hypocritical bourgeois. “Mercedes is anti-’Emanuelle,’ against such films to which a man who has a mistress brings his family.”

Instead, she and Tanner were trying to find a film equivalent to the sophisticated eroticism of serious fiction, painting, sculpture. “We both were excited about how to capture love images, akin to trying to capture a butterfly in your hand when a kid. I don’t say that I’m a saint of sex, but Tanner and I felt that sex and purity were not necessarily enemies.”

Mezieres let out that her real father, whom she never met, came from Cairo, and her mother is of Czech origin. Her mother and stepfather were social Bohemians, traveling about France. “I lost all my toys in hotels we left quickly because my parents couldn’t pay the bills.” Part of her childhood was spent in an orphanage in a Parisian suburb, “not for real orphans but for children of poor, unsuccessful artists.”

Mezieres said, “I didn’t go to school before I was nine or 10. But I learned to read by myself studying a dictionary. I was passionate about the stories of gods and goddesses of antiquity in the back of the dictionary.” Almost all of her female schoolmates ended up working in factories. She was one of several girls in her school to graduate. Later, gradually, she earned a degree in modern literature from the Sorbonne.

But first came life. “As soon as I had to deal with real life, it was a mess. Men weren’t the same as dreams.” Mezieres became a model, and then was invited to join the avant-garde theater troupe the Magic Circus, which toured Canada and the United States.

“I wasn’t long out of boarding school and I lived suddenly in a huge tower building at Toronto’s Free University, where they played rock ‘n’ roll music all night. I really came to life for the first time at that moment.”

In October, 1973, Mezieres turned 19. “I cried on my birthday because I wouldn’t be any more in my teens. I decided to be ageless from that time--never to be young, never to be old.”

Back in France, Mezieres embarked on a confusing and constantly shifting career, switching among theater, singing and rock groups, and cinema. Mezieres assumed the leads in several French films without American distribution, but she is best known internationally for her three pictures with Tanner.

“A Flame in My Heart” was unplanned. In Geneva, Tanner told Mezieres the subject of his upcoming movie, about a film director who is looking for an actress who can inspire fictional ideas. Mezieres said to him, “Wow! You’re looking for the actress, but here I am!” Tanner took up the challenge, saying, “Go on then. Send me the material for my story.”

Mezieres returned to Paris, sat in a room trying to write. “I was scared to be self-indulgent. I now understood how writers can turn alcoholic.” Soon she went back to Geneva with notes about her life. She and Tanner sat in cafes and talked and talked. In three days, Tanner discovered the structure of the real script borrowed from Mezieres’ story. They cast the film together.

Johnny, Mercedes’ stormy North African lover, is played by Aziz Kabouche, a stage actor from Lyons of Algerian family origin. Mezieres picked him from a selection of photographs and by watching a video test. Tanner complied. “Tanner is not the type who wants to make a fuss about meeting a million actors for a role. He has an immediate feeling about people.”

Benoit Regent, who portrays the journalist, Pierre, was located in a video of a film feature watched by Tanner and Mezieres. “We were thinking of another guy who had the lead. Tanner said, ‘We came for the other guy, but it’s this one instead.’ I wasn’t sure, but Benoit surprised me a lot. It’s a good part for him. Usually he’s typecast as a psychotic. Here he’s credible as a real man.

“I had very concrete material for the character of Johnny, but Pierre had no real-life model. I was a little bit scared he would be abstract. But in fact, Benoit came out so well that I hope I will never fall in love with a journalist who travels!”

And she plans never to marry anyone.

“I don’t want my man saying someday to me, ‘I have a mistress.’ It would be inevitable in marriage, but I couldn’t survive that.”

Mezieres laughed, having survived the making of “A Flame in My Heart,” and still committed as ever to the Grand Love.

“I would like someone to write me a poem saying ‘I would follow you even to hell,’ but I don’t say that I would really make him do it.”