Impressionist for a New Millennium

Over 15 years French writer-director Olivier Assayas has made an impressive series of intimate films exploring eternal themes of love and betrayal, life and death. They often take place in lower-end apartments inhabited by people living on the edge or in an otherwise marginal existence.

None of Assayas’ work surfaced outside institutional film series and festivals until the theatrical release in 1997 of “Irma Vep,” an unexpected and amusing blast at contemporary French filmmaking that starred Hong Kong’s lovely and versatile Maggie Cheung, playing herself as an actress trapped in a calamity-besieged production based on Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial “Les Vampires.”

Assayas, who is now married to Cheung, has made another radical departure with “Les Destinees,” bringing his mastery of complex intimate relationships to bear upon a dynastic saga spanning the first three decades of the 20th century in an eminent Limoges china-manufacturing family.

It is based on a novel by Jacques Chardonne, who was inspired by events in his mother’s family, the famous Havilands, and his father’s family, who were cognac merchants; both families were Protestant. The film stars Charles Berling as Jean Barnery, who for years resists his destiny as the head of the family porcelain factory; Emmanuelle Beart as his devoted second wife; and Isabelle Huppert as his unjustly discarded first wife.

A thin, boyish-looking man of 47, Assayas, who speaks English with lively ease, sat down for an interview in his West Hollywood hotel during a brief stay earlier this year. Since Assayas’ late father was a screenwriter who began as an assistant to Max Ophuls and G.W. Pabst, Assayas grew up among film people. His mother designs fashion accessories.

“It seems like I’ve wanted to make this movie forever,” said Assayas. “Writing and directing to me is the same thing. At some point I had been making three movies in a row, all of them about my knowledge of my generation. I just didn’t want to be typecast, and one way of opening myself up was to adapt something by a writer I’ve always admired.”

It was not an easy process.

“When finally we got the rights to the novel in 1995 I just realized this was a huge thing. This was going to be very complicated and swallow up a lot of my time, so I wrote the screenplay with my friend Jacques Fieschi, who I’ve known for ages and is the writer for ‘A Heart in Winter,’ one of the better late Claude Sautet films.”

After six months of working together he and Fieschi had to stop for a while because the film became too expensive and complicated to make. Producer Bruno Pesery “was scared by the length of the film, the whole thing was just too complicated,” Assayas said. “But gradually the producer who couldn’t make it at the time fell in love with the idea and felt it would be a good movie.”

In their quest for authenticity, Assayas and Fieschi studied materials Chardonne used himself. They visited “Limoges and Charente, all those southwest of France areas, and we met people who were part of the family of Jacques Chardonne.”

That Chardonne “was inspired by real-life people ... was the most exciting part of it,” Assayas said. “He kind of combined a few characters to make up some of the people. But the ... places, the story, the whole industrial background was part of his blood.”

While having the film’s central character start out as a minister is fictional, Assayas explained, the love story between the minister and his second wife is drawn from Chardonne’s marriage. “He’s bringing in the religious element to bring some kind of cohesiveness to the whole thing. Obviously the Protestant element is hugely important because those people are a minority in France, but they are industrialists and also the reason why they’ve been selling their products to the Protestant world.”

As well as the language and the characters, the look of a period film is critical, and Assayas early on started working with production designer Katia Wyszkop.

“When you’re dealing with re-creating the past I think that to me the issue is, How can I make the past feel like the present? How can I re-create this thing so that we don’t look down on these people and we don’t look at the people who have values so far from our own and somehow function. You have to find the path to create the obviousness of how this sort of world and society functions, and you can only do it by being so incredibly precise and really careful with every single detail and never try to superimpose ... mentalities of today.

“To me it was so important to be incredibly accurate in re-creating a book that was based on documented information. We used so many pictures of the Haviland factory,” Assayas said. “They gave us so many pictures for documentation, we were very lucky in that sense, and the factory scenes are, let me see, 1910 or 1913, the year that the Havilands had every single workshop photographed.”

From the time Assayas started preparing the film in 1996 he knew he wanted to do it with Beart and Huppert, but it took him a while to come up with Berling as the actor he wanted to play Jean Barnery. He wanted to make a film infused with the ideas of Impressionism and felt Beart could have been a Renoir or Corot model.

“Everybody knows about Impressionism, this national treasure,” said Assayas, “but everybody has forgotten what it means. It’s about being able to look in a very simple way at the beauty of the world--nature, the colors, the people and simple emotions--in a very straightforward way, and it’s really something so deep and beautiful. People have sort of lost the depth of the meaning, and I wanted to make a movie that goes back to the values of Impressionism, to the beauty of it.

“Isabelle was the only actress in France who can do her part,” said Assayas. “This is the kind of character she loves, and so she and Emmanuelle were very supportive of the project. Charles Berling came later. He really came when, two years later, out of the blue the producer said, ‘Now I have the money.’ That was 1998, and we shot the film summer of ’99. But I think what also gave me the drive to totally imagine the film or find a new path into the film was meeting Charles Berling, because Charles Berling had the kind of capacity of transforming himself. I thought he was a believable minister, an industrialist, believable as a young man. He has this stage actor’s ability to transform himself. In making this film every frame was a total pleasure. You really did have a sense of life, doing it. You saw a whole life unfolding and so on and these people going through all these changes. You really felt that they had a real marriage. It’s really my version of ‘Scenes From a Marriage,’ complicated to make but with a lightness of touch.”

A three-hour movie may hardly seem a light touch, but Assayas begs our indulgence.

“It’s the way Chardonne writes: The emotions he’s describing are just sometimes tiny, but deep, and you have to catch them, and if you just underline them too much all of a sudden they escape. That’s where the ... Impressionist influence was essential. It’s really what gave me the overview of the film that made me understand that I had to find the same lightness of touch, the same ability to catch things in a very spontaneous way that I’ve always connected to Impressionist painting. To me, once the sets were there, once the extras were there, once the costumes were there, the only thing that mattered was the landscapes, the color, the sun, the feeling of winter, the summer. That’s really what this movie is about.”

Even though the movie proved a commercial disappointment in France, where it was reasonable to expect that audiences would be most receptive, Assayas remains philosophically optimistic. “Ever since I started making movies it has been about exploring the world. They have been a way of expanding my interests and of understanding things I had no access to in my world. And every single movie I have made, to me, has been a way of trying to expand my vision.”

For his next film, “Demonlover,” that vision fast-forwarded to what has been described as a “cyber thriller.” Whether it will fare better commercially than “Les Destinees” is hard to guess, but the selection committee liked it well enough to include it among the competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which got underway Wednesday night.

He felt privileged to make “Les Destinees,” he said, “because it is an occasion to explore the past, and when you spend so much time studying the way people worked, lived, fought at that time, you have this new layer of understanding of today’s world.

“And making movies in that sense is very much a privilege. I mean, every single day when we were making this film I would walk into those sets that had all been re-created so precisely. I just felt like I was walking into another world, another time, and I just thank the reality of that world. The ghosts were there.”