Miguel Gomes – “The balance between lightness and gravity is what cinema is all about”

How did the film come about?

Miguel Gomes – I discovered an amazing producer, Filipa Reis, to whom I explained that I’d like to take a trip to the Far East with my screenwriters before writing the film. A more conventional or less adventurous producer would have said no, but she didn’t. I also wanted to shoot some sort of archive footage during the trip, which we then used as inspiration for the screenplay. This organic idea of reacting to the world, of sharing the things we’ve experienced, gives us ideas for different, less literary scripts. In 2020, we went away for five weeks, during which we filmed the people, the streets, the landscapes – in cinema, landscapes are the reflection of the characters’ states of mind – all in 16mm; images that we had already edited a little. Then we started writing. As Covid had hit while we were in Japan and forced us to go home, we had to shoot the missing images remotely, two years later – me in front of the monitors in Lisbon and the technicians in China, live. Then we shot the scenes in studios in Rome and Lisbon. But the idea was always to mix very different, heterogeneous images, some in color, some in black and white, some documentary – without hiding the fact that they were shot in 2020, so not in 1918 – some fictional, while still creating continuity between them.

Why did you choose to tell the story in two parts, in a “total » shot/counter-shot structure: Edward’s story in the first half, and Mollie’s in the second?

I was interested in mixing tones and genres. The first half is more like an American-style remarriage comedy, a screwball comedy with a character running away from his fiancée, and the second half is much more tragic. I believe that this balance between lightness and gravity is what cinema is all about.

Is life more tragic for women than it is for men? 

I wouldn’t generalize about it, but in the film, yes. It’s important. The female character is more considerable, she’s more serious, she changes more than the man does, and she goes through every stage from extravagance to profound gravity at the end. And I believe that this balance between lightness and gravity is what makes it cinema. I think my film is about faith, about the beliefs of people, of characters, but also about the belief that cinema can do things, about belief in fiction, in the spectacle of the world. Succeeding in establishing a link between fictional cinema (the studio) and the world as it is. What I like to do is link things that are physically separate, so that the viewer can fantasize about them. That’s what I wanted to work on in this film. Sometimes cinema tries too hard to convince us that something is happening in front of our eyes, when we know that it’s not, that it’s « cinema », fiction, because we’re not stupid and we know that. It comes from the fact, then, that we sign the pact of fiction. 

Traduction Emma Frigo