FOLDING THE GAP: SUZANNE LINDON

SUZANNE LINDON AND CLAIRE DENIS KNEW ONE ANOTHER BEFORE THEY’D EVEN MET. IN WRITING A FILM TOGETHER, THEY FOUND KINSHIP THAT SURPASSES AGE AND EXPERIENCE.

By Morgan Becker

“When I discovered your film and your background and your story,” Suzanne Lindon says to Claire Denis, “I was not counting our common points. But I was feeling that, if I wanted to live this passion, I wanted to live it the way you have.”

The pair’s paths have indeed crossed over one another in a handful of fateful moments. Suzanne—the daughter of Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, bona fide French cinematic royalty—grew up admiring Claire’s films, which her father showed her as a girl, beginning with Beau Travail (1999). It’s widely considered her masterpiece, detailing the fall of a French Foreign Legion sergeant, triggered by his dark obsession with a young soldier in his unit; the bulk of their tension is told through movement—low-slung sizing-up and drills done side-by-side with stony exertion. Beau Travail’s last scene is one of the most transcendent in modern cinema: Sergeant Galoup prepares his deathbed, on the verge of suicide. Cut to a nightclub, and against Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night,” he dances with a disarming freedom, spinning and flailing, affirming brand-new life.

Claire knew of Suzanne long before that exposure—on set with Vincent as they shot Friday Night (2002) a few months after her birth. It’d be two decades before they formed their own friendship, in the afterglow of Suzanne’s directorial and acting debut. Spring Blossom (2020) follows a 16-year-old schoolgirl as she falls in love with an older man, unfolding a chaste, eccentric romance traversing the streets of Paris. She wrote in it the summer before lycée, shot it just after her baccalaureates. It came into the world as she turned 20; Claire saw it in theaters and was moved.

There are echoes of Beau Travail in Spring Blossom: its privileging of atmosphere over dialogue, its lilting rhythm, the question of a power imbalance and of a life suspended. Most evidently, Suzanne’s film has its own overt choreography. Dance and synchronized movement, dreamlike or on the edges of the plot, are an innocent outlet for the unspeakable emotion and want between the protagonist and her lover.

Despite gulfs in age, experience, and course, Claire asked Suzanne if she’d co-write her forthcoming feature: The Cry of the Guards, adapted from Bernard-Marie Koltes’s play Black Battles With Dogs. The drama is set on a construction site in Senegal, where a project supervisor and engineer welcome the former’s partner to their shared accommodations. A man named Alboury approaches in the darkness, stating he’ll remain until he’s returned the body of his brother, killed in an accident on the job.

Suzanne signed on immediately. The project as well as the collaboration make you think of Claire’s beginnings: She found her way to cinema via mentorship, assistant directing for the likes of Wim Wenders, Jacques Rivette, and Dušan Makavejev. It was Wim who pushed her to go off on her own, leading to the acclaimed Chocolat (1988)—loosely based on Claire’s upbringing across French colonial Africa—and further triumphs like I Can’t Sleep (1994), The Intruder (2004), and 35 Shots of Rum (2008).

For Beyond Noise, the filmmakers reflect on their peculiar bond and what they gained in creating together.

MORGAN BECKER: How did the two of you meet?

SUZANNE LINDON: We met twice for me. The first time was at a Cannes party. Of course, I’d heard about you because of my father and because of your films and because of my mother, too—Claire played my mother’s mother in a film when I wasn’t [yet] born.

CLAIRE DENIS: Before you were even thought about.

SL: [Laughs] And so, of course, I knew you—but I’d never met you. When you went to the movies to see my film, you left me a message that I sent to my email so I could keep it. I still have it.

CD: For me, the history is slightly different, because I was working with your father a few months after your birth. I knew about Suzanne, which school she was going to. I knew in the summer what she was doing. But there was a barrier; knowing the father and the mother doesn’t make for an easy connection with you.

When I saw your film, it’s weird to say that I was proud: proud about you doing a film, especially that film. This does not explain, in any case, why—a year and a half after—we met in the streets and I asked you if you would accept to work with me on a script. Knowing [she was] a very young woman, and me, even older than her mother and father, should normally prevent me from asking such a crazy thing. It was a great luck for me when she said, ‘Oh yes, of course.’

SL: Of course I said yes!

CD: It was, for me, not so clear. I thought she would say no, or I don’t have the time, or I have to write my own script. It was like waving in the distance, Hey, Suzanne!

SL: I’m very moved, because now we know each other very well. But sometimes, it’s hard to say things like this. It’s maybe the first time we have.

CD: Exactly.

SL: Sometimes you love films because you love the person—and for me, I loved you because I first knew you through your films. To write with you… You acted with my mother and you directed films with my dad, but you’ve never written anything with them. It was a special place that you made for me.

CD: Yes. I think it would have been easy for me to ask you to act in a film—and I think I will. [Laughs] But to ask someone to be a partner in the scriptwriting is to share something very different. Scriptwriting is very, very interesting, but it’s a strange country where you can make so many mistakes.

SL: I was really shy. But the first time we worked on the script, the shyness completely stopped. You were talking about the age difference earlier—but I’ve never felt it with you. When you talk about [your] actors, I always feel that you really love them. Working with you meant that we were going to love each other.

CD: And trust. This generational gap exists in reality. It would exist on a set if you were acting. But in scriptwriting, you’re already in a different world—a world that is not yet there. It’s like working on a close future, and it’s full of drawback, and it’s full of danger. It makes an obligation to feel that trust, and that trust has absolutely no reason to consider the gap between your age and my age.

I never ask someone to work with me the way I did with you. Never, never. In your film, I was able to see deep in you. As a young woman, you are asking questions about life and love that are so far from who I was, even though my time of youth was so different from today.

SL: When I discovered your film and your background and your story, I was not counting our common points. But I was feeling that, if I wanted to live this passion, I wanted to live it the way you have.

CD: I hope you will have a smoother path.

SL: You represent a very powerful idea of filmmaking, because you started with filmmakers that became your friends, like Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. You were there to build their films with them.

CD: To build? No, I mean—to be their assistant was something very selfish in a way, because I was helping me. I was not so confident in my own self. I needed Jacques Rivette or Wim to push me: Go, make your own film, you know?

SL: But now, seeing that you’ve asked a young girl to work with you—

CD: A young woman.

SL: A young woman. It makes me proud, because I can relate to young you—making films close to the way you do.

MB: Are there specific methods of Claire’s that you’d like to pick up?

SL: What I loved, and what amazed me, is the ability you have to doubt. You doubt, you make decisions, and sometimes you ask for help—knowing, in a way, what you would like to hear and what you need to hear. You’ve made so many films. Everybody’s seen your films and everybody loves your films.

CD: No, not everyone—

SL: Every smart person loves Claire Denis. [Laughs]

CD: I have read often, in critiques of my films, that the scriptwriting was apparently not so important to me, because the storytelling was a little bit loose. I think I like when a story seems to be a tight knot, [which leads to] that moment when, suddenly, it’s less tight. I saw that in your film immediately. Not in the sense that there is a lack of something. The opposite—it’s the freedom to go toward that looseness.

SL: The first of your films I saw was Beau Travail. It was the first my dad showed me, because of the dance at the end. What struck me was your freedom. Your freedom when you tell stories, but also the freedom you have to go film other lands, other generations. It’s in the way you film bodies, the way you film sensuality—

CD: You did the same in your film.

MB: You both wear a lot of hats in the filmmaking process—writing, directing, acting. Where does that versatility show up in your work?

SL: When I did my film, I acted in it because I wanted to act. I also wanted to feel legitimate [in saying that], and because of my parents, it was sometimes hard. So I wrote something I could play. At the beginning, I think that my desire was really more to act than to make films. But I discovered something about me [in the process]. I remember my mom telling me that Claire was a genius; really, that she was the best fake mother she ever had. My mom—when she shot this film with you—she was 28, five years older than me now.

CD: To act in a film like I did with your mother—I was invited. To be the main character of a film, like you did, is something I’ve been tempted by, but I never dared do. The people who are writing, directing, and acting in their films—it’s not because they think they can do everything. It’s because they expose themselves so much more than others. It’s very brave. I was terribly in admiration of you. You act like [someone] who wrote their own story, inside and outside.

SL: If it happened that I didn’t like the film in the end, I could only blame myself. And I would never bring other people into my mess, you know? Of course, there were other actors with me. But I felt that I was taking on the responsibility of success. When you did [Chocolat] with Isaach de Bankolé, who you knew very well, maybe you trusted him so much that you were capable of living this first adventure with him.

CD: I could have been the young woman in Chocolat, but I think the story was about this young man and not my own youth. I wanted other people to act those parts. In your film, the [question of] who is this young woman? belongs to you. The story of [Chocolat] belongs to me—to my vision—but it was dedicated to the story of colonialism.

MB: Youth is a theme in both of your practices. Do you think you’ll continue to grapple with it so directly?

SL: I’m thinking of something else to work on, and it’s linked to a young me—a memory from when I was young.

CD: When you were a child?

SL: Yeah, when I was a baby. [Laughs] But I think, this time, I’d like to try not to act in it, so I can have a second first time. I love first times.

CD: For a strange reason—I realized this not immediately, but I’m sure about it now—each film is a first time. I have a strange feeling that it’s hard to be an old fighter. It’s always a new thing, a new horizon. And I think you will experience that all along.

SL: When I see you writing, when you doubt or when we doubt, when we have conversations on what we think about a scene or what we could move or what we could change—

CD: Or avoid completely.

SL: [Laughs] Or avoid completely. I think that what I loved the most was to discover how much it was still a first time—a kind of love at first sight for the story we are telling.