Listening to the inner voice

The ambiguity of emotional ties, especially family-related, is one of the recurring themes of her cinema, usually addressed with sarcasm and a corrosive and uninhibited gaze: “Sunday Lunch” (2015) accurately recreates a traumatic Sunday family lunch with a provocative and vindictive tone; “You Will Be Fine” (2017) follows 15 minutes in the life of a couple disintegrating, spotlighting particularly cruel and rude moments between them, resulting from a true emotional hangover; “Everybody Loves Jeanne” (2022) is her first feature, which has just premiered at the Critics Week in Cannes and focuses on a French woman, deep in debt, who travels to Portugal in order to sell the house of her mother, who died about a year ago. These movies address sensitive topics – such as family trauma, the end of love affairs, death, or depression – with a laid-back approach, between tragic and comic, which underlines the conflicting aspects of everyday life that make us suffer, but also help us grow emotionally.

Her academic background in Literature and History is also conspicuous in her artistic work. Céline Devaux particularly enjoys developing seemingly paradoxical characters, who think and act in different ways, from the memorable and enigmatic Rasputin, mythical monk at the court of Russian tsars, to the more recent Jeanne, an ordinary woman of our times. The inner voice is a tool used by the director to bring the viewer closer to these characters and get into their minds, creating an empathic and complicit relationship. The use of animation, especially combined with live-action footage, emphasizes this duality in a more expressive style, while also helping the filmmaker to reconcile, in a very dynamic way, these seemingly irreconcilable parts of her characters.