Adèle Exarchopoulos: ‘Film Shoots Are Like Little Summer Love Stories’

For Adèle Exarchopoulos, her first taste of film stardom was the literal taste of Toblerone. Then 13 years old, the young Parisian had just been cast in her first film, Jane Birkin’s autobiographical directing debut Boxes, and was invited round to the icon’s home. “I went to the bathroom to wash my hands,” Exarchopoulos recalls. “And I saw for the first time in my life a claw-foot tub. With a bowl of mini Toblerones next to it. And I was like: ‘Why are you eating chocolate when you’re taking a bath? This is so cool.’ And Jane said: ‘You want to sleep over? You can take a bath and eat some chocolate.’”

She beams at the memory. We’re talking, via Zoom, days after Birkin died aged 76; Exarchopoulos remembers her fondly as “the first person who gave me a chance – really benevolent, kind and loving”. They’d seen each other again over the years, but the close-quarters shoot is what sticks in her mind: “Cinema is about living really intense stuff with people, for a certain period of time, and afterwards you all go back to your daily lives. It’s like a mini death after, suddenly no longer sharing that intimacy, but you have this kind of forever tenderness for those people. Film shoots are like little summer love stories.”

Now 29, Exarchopoulos has cycled through many such love stories, and doesn’t feel them any less deeply each time. At 19, she broke out with a stunning performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, playing a schoolgirl plunged into a volatile lesbian relationship with an older art student. In a first for the Cannes film festival, she and co-star Léa Seydoux shared the Palme d’Or with their director, while Exarchopoulos also won a César for most promising actress.

Her latest is an emotionally acute triangle: Ira Sachs’s exquisite hothouse relationship drama Passages, in which she plays Agathe, a schoolteacher who comes between polysexual film-maker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his long-term partner Martin (Ben Whishaw). True to form for the American writer-director, it’s a film of raw feeling and physical intimacy: Exarchopoulos and Rogowski’s onscreen affair plays out through rough-and-tumble dialogue and candid sex scenes. (The film fell foul of prudish US censors, who slapped it with a commercially restrictive NC-17 certificate; distributor Mubi opted to release it unrated instead.)

Exarchopoulos sees nothing provocative about the film, which to her portrays a very relatable form of desire. “We all go through this kind of sensual attraction where you meet someone and you already know that you will have sex with this person, which is a really strange feeling,” she says. “Maybe it won’t be so good. Maybe you will be disappointed. But you know it will happen. And that’s exciting.” (...)

Not that she was altogether blindsided on Kechiche’s film, she says; she was more unnerved by the process of unveiling the film to the world, and unprepared for the commentary it generated. “With more maturity, I now know that it was a very hard experience in the sense of the commitment that we were being asked in some of the scenes,” she says. “And it’s true that probably the controversy spoiled the project and the beauty of it, because we were making something that really belonged to us in the first place.”

For all her conflicted memories regarding the film, it’s still dear to her. “I have a lot of love for Kechiche,” she says. “And it was one of those shoots where I came out of it telling myself, OK, I couldn’t have been better. Which is really, really rare when you are an actor. It was like shooting life in a way, like you’re making a documentary about your own character.”

by Guy Lodge, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Blue is the Warmest Colour

[ed. I loved her and the movie Blue is the Warmest Colour (and not for the extended sex scenes, though they were a bonus, for sure). Depictions of the French educational system were especially interesting. See the movie (but not with the kids).]