Think of Him as a maker of Miniatures

“Pauline and Paulette,” a delightful and affectionate Belgian tale of elderly sisters of delicacy, humor and poignancy that opens Friday at selected theaters, marks the feature directorial debut of Lieven Debrauwer, a lanky Fleming with long hair who turns 33 next month but looks a decade younger. Debrauwer, fluent in English, is also a singer, and will be heard in an upcoming Elmo Aardvark cartoon. He is a humorous man with a gentle demeanor who grew up in a small town, where his parents owned and operated a cafe.

“I must have been a very difficult kid to buy toys for, because I didn’t play with little trains and cars like my younger brother did, but I loved those Viewmasters,” he recalled in an interview earlier this year at the Belgian consul-general’s home in Hancock Park. “Behind the cafe, there was this large place you could rent for parties. We also had funerals there, and when it was empty I used it as a theater. I had a projector, so whenever people came to our cafe with their children, I asked them to come to that place when it was empty and gave them a private screening of little movies, like seven minutes I had from Walt Disney’s ‘Cinderella.’ I showed it over and over.

“There was this man who filmed wedding parties at the cafe with one of the first Super-8 cameras, and I wanted to try it out myself and he let me use it. So for my 15th birthday, I had my own Super-8 film made. I and my friends invented our own version of ‘Snow White.’”

After studying photography for three years in Ghent, Debrauwer went on to film school in Brussels. “I graduated in ‘91, and while I became an independent, I had to make a living,” he said. “The first year was really terrible. I had no work at all, I did some photography stuff, and finally I worked for a one-hour photo lab.” Eventually, he landed a job in the video department of an advertising agency and stayed for five years. “I did a lot of local television commercials, low-budget, and also promotional films.” said Debrauwer. “I had fun, although I wasn’t telling the stories I wanted to tell, but I was working with these tools I wanted to work with, cameras, lights and sound.

“In my last year in film school, I had an idea for a short film, but it took me five or six years to actually get to shoot it, because I wanted to do it with a professional actress, and I thought of Dora van der Groen, the one who plays Pauline. She’s a legendary actress, so I knew her from television since I was a kid. She’s a wonderful actress like Jessica Tandy or Dame Judi Dench or Maggie Smith. She was that caliber, and, well, I just looked up her address, wrote her a letter, saying I’m 22, I’ve only made short films so far, but I really want to make this film with you. Exactly one day and a half from when I posted my letter, she called me.” Van der Groen agreed instantly but said she would have to wind up a TV series first, which allowed Debrauwer time to raise money for a budget.

“She was really impressed that as a young person I wanted to tell a story about an older woman who was starting to forget things. This film, ‘Leonie,’ was an official selection in 1997 at Cannes, where it won the jury prize [for short films]. Dora’s really very enthusiastic, and I felt I had to find another project for her, and I thought of the idea of having her and another living legend, Ann Petersen, together in a film.

“I was thinking that they could be neighbors, or strangers that get to know each other in the course of the film. They might be sisters, and that reminded me of our neighbors. On the other side of the street from our cafe, there was a ladies’ shop on the corner, run by two sisters. Since my mother was working in the cafe, she would call, saying she needed a new pair of stockings and I had to go get them. I had to ring the bell, enter the shop, and they would both be behind the counter. I would be red-faced but had to get the order for my mother. The atmosphere of the shop and that image of the sisters stayed with me. I thought it would be wonderful if I could capture that, and that is how the idea of ‘Pauline and Paulette’ started.”

At a party at Cannes, Dominique Janne, a producer of the Belgian film “Farinelli,” approached Debrauwer and asked him if he was working on anything. Debrauwer handed him a one-page synopsis of “Pauline and Paulette” and was on his way. “Of course, it took a long time to get it financed; I think we lost about two years in the financing of the film. Because, first of all, it’s a Flemish film, it’s a foreign-language film, so even when we went to France, we had to have the script translated even to have people read it for a co-production. Then the two main characters are in their 70s, so that isn’t very commercial, and one of them is retarded.

“But I was really happy that in the script the producer could really read that it was meant to be a kind of miniature film. I remember when I was in Sienna in Italy, I was in a church, and they had big books, and they had miniatures, which I adored. They were very small, but I could adore them as much as a painting on the wall, and I thought, this is the kind of picture I want to make, a work of art that should be appreciated as such. The producer understood that.”

“Pauline and Paulette” evolved into a drama with humor involving four sisters. The eldest has stayed on in the family home, a cottage on the edge of town with a glorious garden--a luminous Thomas Kinkade image come to life--caring for Pauline, who is somewhat mentally retarded and requires constant supervision. When the eldest sister dies, a crisis erupts. The youngest sister lives in Brussels with a sophisticated, exacting lover, not a welcoming situation for the childlike Pauline. Yet the plump Paulette, a frilly cabbage rose of a woman, who has an apartment above her shop and lives and works in a sea of reds and pinks, is about to retire as the prima donna of the local operetta company and pack up her business and move to a seaside retirement community. What is to happen to Pauline?

“I think we miss a lot of tenderness in this world,” Debrauwer said of how his film plays out. “Although I don’t like the word ‘message’ in regard to my film--and movies may be a business, a job, entertainment, a form of art--if you cannot do them with love and respect, then why bother doing them?”