Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani presented their fourth film. Reflection in a Dead Diamond in this year’s Berlinale competition. Since it was the most exhilarating film at the festival, I was thrilled to be able to sit down with the couple to discuss this multifaceted work (pun intended).
The Disapproving Swede: So, the project more or less started with Fabio Testi. Could you talk a bit about that?
Bruno Forzani: It’s a long story because my mother was a big fan of Fabio Testi, and my sister would have had the name Fabio if she had been a boy. I discovered him through Italian B-movies, and I loved him. He was also in Zulawski’s L’Important, c’est d’aimer; in 2010, we watched Road to Nowhere by Monte Hellman, and Testi’s character reminded us of Sean Connery.
Hélène Cattet: He was dressed in a white suit. It reminded us about Death in Venice, too. So we thought, “What if we mix those two antagonist universes to create something like a new universe?”
BF: We also saw a staging of Tosca, the opera, by Christophe Honoré. He treated it like Sunset Boulevard, and that kind of treatment was an inspiration for our film. We wrote the script with Fabio Testi in mind. We managed to meet him and were fascinated by him because we saw his eyes just in front of us, which we had only seen in close-ups in movies. We began to talk about directing actors just through the eyes, and it was the first time we met an actor who was used to that.
Then, we told him we would shoot on film, and he was surprised and agreed to do the movie. It was great because Fabio synthesized the mix we wanted to do between this Euro spy genre and Death in Venice. He was in Italian Westerns, but he was in other kinds of films as well, so it was a perfect match.
TDS: When he got the script, his first reaction was that he didn’t understand anything, right?
BF: Yeah, exactly, but it was the same with Monte Hellman. He did not understand the script, but he trusted him, and when we met him, he trusted us, so voila!
How do you synthesize all these ideas and different references to build a story, even if it is a story on your own terms? Your films are mostly vibes, so how do you make a story out of this? Is it organic?
HC: It was really technical this time because we were building the story with different layers of narration. We put one colour for each line of narration, three altogether. Then, we could organize how those layers will interweave and respond to each other. You develop different thematics and different points of view because you can see the movie from different angles. Each spectator can find a way to experience the film so that two spectators can see a different movie. We aim to be playful and create a game for the audience.
BF: When we write the script, we are writing it technically with detailed descriptions of every detail you will see and hear in the movie. It is not typical since we live in a French-speaking culture, and the cinema world is more literate than cinematic.
HC: We really want to tell the story using cinematographic means, not through dialogue.
TDS: You call it storytelling. Is the story the most crucial thing, rather than the cinematic expression, or don’t you see a contrast?
HC: There’s no contrast between the form and the content. It’s one thing. The form tells the story, not the content.
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani about Diamond structure
TDS: When it comes to stylistics, I thought a bit about Raoul Ruiz. You mentioned playfulness, and he had a way of toying with clichés and adding narrative layers in a complex, sometimes crystal structure.
BF: You are not the first to say that regarding the film’s construction.
TDS: Gilles Deleuze described Alain Resnais and other directors as having a crystalline structure, but here, we even have a diamond structure where things go through reflections and refractions.
HC: Exactly!
BF: Since the beginning, the word diamond was in the title. It wasn’t the same title, but we constructed the film like a diamond because there are several facets.
HC: Yes, that’s why you can see the movie like a diamond through different prisms.
TDS: You mentioned Op art earlier. You have different art styles in all your films. Can you talk a bit more about the use of op art in this film?
BF: The film is about illusion because you don’t know if the past of the hero is an illusion or if it’s reality. The past is represented by this horror-spy aesthetic, where you think the world was funny and very pop-like, but the heroes were violent, in fact. It is a fake representation of the world. Since the film is about illusion, the structure is an illusion, too, because of the different layers. Op art was the perfect art to approach the story visually. In fact, when we began to work on the script, we went to Nice. There was a big Op art exhibition there, which inspired us.
TDS: You mentioned Clozuot’s La Prisionnière. Were there other films using Op art that inspired you as well?
BF: The funny thing is that the Italian B-movies we mentioned are exploitation movies but use a lot of art and Op art. There is also Mario Caiano’s L’Occhio nel labirinto. James Bond films are another example, like The Man with the Golden Gun, where you have a kind of labyrinth, which is very Op art. It’s a very funny art form since it’s mixed with something very popular.
TDS: A last, tangential musical question: You use a piece from Catalani’s La Wally [Ebben? Ne andrò lontana], made famous by the film Diva. Isn’t it the exact same recording as in Diva?
BF: Yes, exactly. In this version, there is an introduction that you don’t have in the original, and I love this introduction. I discovered opera with Diva, and I love that piece.