SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER

  • SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER
  • SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER
  • SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER
  • SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER
  • SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER

SECRETS SHARED WITH A STRANGER

In 1907, in St Petersburg between the two revolutions, the young and carefree Natalia (Sandrine Bonnaire) has everything she needs to be happy: a lovely little son, a rich husband who allows her to live as she pleases and lovers who desire her... However, one afternoon, at the bird market on the banks of the Neva, a chance encounter with a stranger (William Hurt) and a simple wish confided to a bird change her peaceful life forever. What could this happy young woman possibly desire? Her independence? Could such a goal only be attained through the death of her husband who is no more of a nuisance than another? Is it a coincidence that a mysterious killer smashes her husband's skull in that very night? St Petersburg in the early years of this century provides the background for this universal tale. Natalia wanders through the city and struggles in its web without us ever really knowing if she is the spider or the fly. Beneath a suspense-filled, romantic plot with numerous twists, Confidences à un inconnu relates the astonished and painful awaking of a woman who, like everyone around her, has to face the harsh test of freedom.

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REVUE DE PRESSE

7 questions for Georges Bardawil

After writing books, launching magazines, nightclubs and restaurants, why make a first film ? You mean "why make my first […]

7 questions for Georges Bardawil

After writing books, launching magazines, nightclubs and restaurants, why make a first film ?

You mean "why make my first film at an age when I should be making my last?" Because I am living my life all over the place and I try to do my best with the cards that fate has dealt me. For me, cinema is the art of accomplishing what is given to us with what the heavens send us. I sometimes have the impression that the world is a casino and God the croupier. He did me a favour on the day when he allowed me to realize an old dream. A director is an alchemist without knowing it. Of course, a first film has its clumsiness and naivety but I accept that. That helped me avoid tics and boring automatic reflexes. I prefer to be the one who seeks rather than the one who knows and I hope that I will make other first films: a second first film, a third first film, etc.



Could you sum up the film in two words ?

I'd choose "love" and "freedom". A vast agenda as old as the world itself! The tale of Lost Paradise already deals with love and freedom. The difference between Eve and Natalia is that the latter has more lovers! Freedom or rather independence, since that is why everyone fights and kills each other, is a means of escaping stereotypes; conformity; the mould that each person wishes to impose on another. The murder of an authoritarian husband that should return her independence to Natalia makes her, on the contrary, fall prey to the desires of those who, claiming to love her, enclose her within an image that isn't hers. It's the endless conflict of love and freedom. As soon as someone is in love, their first desire is to change the other person. "Why are you in love with me if you want to change me?" Natalia, threatened by the moulds that everyone presents her, runs to the arms of the only man who asks nothing of her... Except to belong to each other. And that is the worst thing since it's the moment when we realize that the bars are within us. And our freedom is our last cage.



Your film is adapted from a short story by Valérie Brioussov. What led you to choose it ?

The biography of Inès Armand that I was writing. Three years of investigations on the heels of this Frenchwoman, Lenin's mistress, buried within the Kremlin, had led me to discover Russia at the start of the 20th century. That was when I read Brioussov's work. She was a leading light of the Russian symbolist school and translated Verlaine at the age of nineteen. The short story, censured at the time, led to a trial similar to those against Baudelaire and Flaubert. It interested me for the symbolic reading that I made of it and I suggested to Gilles Laurent - with whom I had already written a screenplay - to work with me on this romantic and suspenseful plot that related the painful awakening of a young woman learning to her expense how difficult it is to be free. It took us three months to write the screenplay.



Why Saint Petersburg at this particular period ?

Because Saint Petersburg is like Natalia. It's a labyrinth-like city, with countless faces, a coquettish and powdered city, unpredictable and seductive. A place of pleasure and violence, full of refinement and triviality, as if it retained the memory of the marshes that its palaces are built on. As for the choice of the period, that too is originally in Brioussov's novella. We haven't modernized it because the subject dealt with is universal and timeless. I think that, paradoxically, the distance with a story places it within our reach and allows us to better perceive it. By sticking close to the romantic and novel-like elements, it was a way of better coinciding with our own period, with its constant desire to escape reality.



Why do your characters all speak French ?

Until the 1917 Revolution, French was the first language in Saint Petersburg. It was a city that followed the French lead in the fields of art, fashion, luxury and pleasure. The restaurants were French; people drank cognac, claret and champagne. Fashion and manners were Parisian. Period photos show us streets and houses covered with advertising that is often bilingual; you find Guerlain perfume, Vuitton luggage, Poulain chocolate, etc… French was spoken with a varied range of accents, as the film shows.



Tell us a little about your heroine and the stranger.

Cinema and literature have two sorts of heroes: the "centrifuge" and the "centripetal" force: the one who seeks and the one towards whom everything converges: the detective, the cowboy and the femme fatale, Lancelot and Citizen Kane. Natalia (Sandrine Bonnaire) has the particularity of being a heroine of both types: she runs after herself and her freedom while being the focus of people's looks and desires. She is also the stranger in this story; some would say that she doesn't understand what is happening while others may think that she feels nothing. Wrong! She is natural. Her apparent coldness isn't frigidity; she simply hasn't encountered pleasure yet. She is incomplete. She doesn't lie, she remains silent. She doesn't belong to the world of adults. She gives herself to men without ever really giving herself away, as if in amusement. Natalia is the opposite of the heroines of the time: Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. In this way, she is a modern woman condemned to wear her armour plating on the inside. In the film, the role of the stranger, played by William Hurt, is that of the guide and the ferryman. Once Natalia has been revealed to herself and the crossing accomplished, he has no reason for being. He can vanish while the traveller continues on her way. He is the ideal husband. He isn't the mirror image of the woman but the one holding out the mirror to her. He is there to awaken her, jostle her and return her to herself, without ever judging her. He helps her weave her own web with the benevolent neutrality of the psychoanalyst. He has loved her since the first day. He wants his love to allow Natalia to travel further along her path, even if this means sacrificing his own life. Indeed, when he asks her not to kill him, he doesn't do so for himself but for her.



Does your film answer the title-question of your first novel, "Aimez-vous les femmes ?" (Do You Love Women)?

Yes. I've never stopped seeking the answer.




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