A novelist who directs the way he writes: still camera, faces held long, one secret kept back until the last reel. When the actor is good enough the method comes close to working perfectly; when the script starts explaining itself, it is merely tasteful.
Fi1m perspective
A woman sits in a job interview and is asked what she has been doing for the last fifteen years. The camera stays where it is. Philippe Claudel lets Kristin Scott Thomas answer with her face before she answers out loud, and that is his whole method in one shot: cast well, hold still, wait. He has said he chose "a very classic style without a lot of camera movement, to work with the audience, to create a connection, space for the audience". In I've Loved You So Long (2008) that space is filled. We were held by her more than we expected a first film to manage, because she gives the lens almost nothing and the lens keeps asking, and we could not look away.
He came to the cinema from the page. He published novels before he directed, wrote scripts for other people's films, and for eleven years taught French in the prison at Nancy, which is why his people are so often marked by guilt or confinement. After the debut came Tous les soleils (2011), a lighter comedy-drama set in Strasbourg; Before the Winter Chill (2013), a drama about a neurosurgeon and his wife that brought Scott Thomas back; A Childhood (2015), shot in his home town of Dombasle-sur-Meurthe with a largely non-professional cast; and the television film Le Bruit des trousseaux (2021), from one of his own novels. He has gone on publishing throughout.
What works is the actors and the waiting. He trusts a face for longer than most directors dare, and he builds a film by keeping one fact back and letting us watch people who already know it. What does not work is the writing, and it is a novelist's fault. In I've Loved You So Long nearly everyone gets a speech that says what the scene is about, and the ending, having withheld its reason for a hundred minutes, spells it out in a scene that runs past the point where it worked. Critics of Before the Winter Chill made much the same complaint: schematic once the premise is set, polished rather than risky, a final revelation that arrives without enough groundwork. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length, but the pattern is familiar. The cinematographer Jérôme Alméras and the editor Virginie Bruant have each worked with him once; Scott Thomas, twice, is the real collaborator.
Start with the debut, which is worth your evening for her alone. The sombre films are where he is most himself, and A Childhood, with its real town and untrained faces, looks like a deliberate attempt to get away from the desk. The debut kept quiet for a hundred minutes and then could not bear to leave us with the silence. His films are better when they keep quiet, and we suspect he knows it.
Biography
Philippe Claudel is a French writer and film director. Born in Dombasle-sur-Meurthe in 1962, he studied literature and film at the University of Nancy and later became a professor of literature there. For over a decade he taught in prisons, an experience that informed much of his subsequent writing.
Claudel is the author of several novels, including Les Âmes grises (Grey Souls), which won the Prix Renaudot. He made his directorial debut with the 2008 film I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), which he also wrote. The film won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language and the César for Best First Feature Film.
