Lost: Cat; Found: Director’s Film

“When the Cat’s Away,” which catches us up into a multicultural world of a vibrant, ever-changing Paris neighborhood, brings to attention its talented 35-year-old writer-director, Cedric Klapisch. A lifelong Parisian himself, Klapisch attended New York University’s prestigious film school. “When the Cat’s Away” is his third film, the first to land American distribution, and has been followed by a fourth, the French box-office hit “Un Air de Famille,” which Klapisch translates idiomatically as “Family Resemblance.”

Of “When the Cat’s Away,” Klapisch said: “It started with a story a friend had told me--a true story about how she had lost her cat.” A stocky man with thinning dark hair, much humor and a relaxed manner, Klapisch talked to a writer last month in his West Hollywood hotel suite as he made a quick stopover on his way to Japan for the opening of “Un Air de Famille.”

“She was going on a vacation and had left her cat with this old lady, but the cat disappeared,” he continued. “The old lady was distraught, and contacted all the other old ladies she knew who took care of cats to help her find it.”

He said he was looking for a story that would be a good way to show how Paris is today.

“I wanted to show the opposition between the trendy modern world and an old-fashioned way of living in Paris that is fast disappearing,” he said. “By coincidence I knew this same old lady, Renee Le Calm, my friend had left her cat with. She had been an extra in two of my films, and I knew she could act. I wanted her to play herself.”

The young woman, played by Garance Clavel, is a fictional character named Chloe. Like most people, especially young people just starting out on their own, Chloe, a makeup artist, scarcely knows anyone in her neighborhood, but the search for her cat connects her with a wide array of people she would never have known otherwise. She experiences that increasingly rare sense of community, which in Paris, like most everywhere, is endangered by redevelopment and displacement of its longtime residents. On another level, Chloe begins to be less concerned with finding her cat and more concerned with finding a lover.

“I really didn’t know the woman who lost her cat very well, and all the men in the movie are invented,” Klapisch said. “But when she saw the film she said, ‘I don’t know how you could guess so many things about my life.’ She said the feeling of loneliness of the girl was very close to her. I also talked to other girls about how a single woman lives in a big city. I found that sometimes they went to gay clubs just to avoid aggressive men.”

He said that, for Le Calm, the disappearance of the cat was “an awful experience.”

“She felt it was a huge fault on her part, and she really got sick over it,” he said. “My friend was amused to become known all over her neighborhood, which is La Bastille in the 10th arrondissement, as ‘the girl who lost her cat.’

“But Renee, who’s 78, became a star, at least for a moment. She speaks that direct Parisian language in her TV interviews. She has no inhibitions. You know how TV hosts are always so comfortable, but Renee always had them on their toes. She has had a hard life, working as a waitress and a restroom attendant. When we flew her to Montreal with the film, she had never been on a plane before. It was a nice thing. We really shared something. What Renee brought to the film was enormous, and she had a good souvenir out of the experience.”

In preparing the film, Klapisch set up an office in La Bastille. “We often interviewed people there, and very often we went for nonprofessionals instead of actors,” he said. “It was important to me that there would be a kind of documentary aspect to the film. The mix between the nonprofessionals and the actors was very rich.

“It was the most exciting shooting I’ve ever done. I had to create scenes on the spot. As the story line was so thin, I had to create something through direction, through composition. Everything happened during the shooting. I really had to improvise; it was a really intense experience. The transitional scenes had to be made up as we went along, but the story line was very precise. It was like jazz: You have a theme, and you can go out from it because you know where and when you have to come back to it.”

In contrast to an increasing number of French films, “When the Cat’s Away” suggests that Arabs and blacks and whites, gays and straights, young and old, can live in harmony. Klapisch remarked that polls show one out of five French citizens is a racist, but that said, “the other four may be nice.”

“I tried to show a place where it is possible for all these different kinds of people to live together. I tried to show that nonviolent relationships between different people can exist. The whole film is about being scared of people, of a woman being scared of men. By the end of the film, Chloe has learned how to talk to all kinds of people. The real subject of the film is how to meet other people and not be afraid of them.”

Klapisch said he went to NYU because “at 23, I really wanted to escape from France for awhile, I like American movies, and they wanted me at the university.”

He said that, although he was bilingual, it was a challenge. “Writing scripts in English was a huge effort!” he said. “But you get to know two cultures, and that makes you feel stronger. I think that’s a good thing.”

He said he shot three films of his own and participated in 20 or 30 more. “I got lots of practical experience,” he said. “Filmmaking is a very, very practical thing. I learned about shooting with children, shooting with old people, shooting in the forest. You learn how to solve problems.” (Before arriving in Los Angeles, Klapisch also stopped over in New York, where he had a reunion with his NYU classmate Todd Solondz, writer-director of “Welcome to the Dollhouse”; Klapisch had worked with Solondz as a cinematographer.)

With “Un Air de Famille,” Klapisch took on a filmmaking challenge radically different from “When the Cat’s Away.” Based on a highly successful French play, it is set in a restaurant where a family meets weekly for dinner.

“Then one night everything goes wrong, and everyone says things they would normally never say,” he said. “I had to find cinematic ideas to make it be more than just a play.”

Currently, he’s preparing “Pe^ut-Etre” (Perhaps). “It’s about a young couple. The girl wants to have a baby, the guy feels he’s not ready to have one--and part of the film takes place in the future. But it’s anti-sci-fi.”

Klapisch seemingly has always wanted to be a filmmaker. “I had a child’s dream to make films, I don’t know why,” he said. “I didn’t know how I would become a filmmaker, but I always knew I would.” Klapisch does credit his parents, however. “My father is a physicist, and my mother is a psychologist. They gave me a taste for research and for observation about the world and the need to know how everything works.”