You close your eyes for an instant and a trainload of life passes by. I last met Ludivine Sagnier, an essential force in French cinema, 22 years ago. She has reason to remember 2003 with fondness (and maybe some confliction). We were in London for the launch of PJ Hogan’s lavish take on Peter Pan. That was the one with Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook, Olivia Williams as Mrs Darling and, yes, Ludivine Sagnier as Tinker Bell. A few months earlier, she had made a different sort of impact when François Ozon’s sexually adventurous Swimming Pool landed in Cannes and instantly made her a very French sort of star. We will come back to that.
But Tinker Bell? Was that fun? She had been a child actor – briefly adjacent to Gérard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac – for a decade before that. So she had preparation.
“It’s a great memory for me,” she nearly blares. “The whole project was amazing, going to Australia, getting to play the legendary Tinker Bell and all that. Doing junkets” – promoting her films to the media – “was a bit new for me at that time. And I can say it is not new any more. I’m very used to that. It was massive exposure. Everything seemed very laid back after that.”
I had forgotten how fabulous her English is. Sagnier puts that down, in part, to her dad being a lecturer in the language. And she is an enormous talker. Set her off and she can ramble smartly for 15 minutes.
After that noisy arrival in the opening years of the century, she settled down to become one of the most reliable actors in French cinema. Christophe Honoré‘s Love Songs was a hit at Cannes in 2007. A year later she exchanged blows with Vincent Cassel in Jean-François Richet’s bifurcated gangster epic Mesrine. More recently, she has been strong in the hit Netflix crime series Lupin.
After all these years, I still associate her with Ozon. She did three films in rapid succession for that famously prolific director: Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women and Swimming Pool. They helped launch each other’s careers. He continues to make a film a year. So does she. Yet they did not work again together until now. The fine, incoming When Autumn Falls, a rural diversion that veers from poignant reverie to murderous melodrama, features Sagnier as an awkward young woman who has never forgiven her ageing mother for earlier unconventional lifestyle choices.
“We knew that we had been through many things together,” she says of Ozon. “We had experienced success, and we had travelled all around the world. So maybe we both felt that we had something to do other than being together. We had to discover other tracks in our careers. So I thought actually that I would never work with him again. I was surprised when he suggested this. Doing three films in a row with one director is already a miracle. Doing a fourth is impossible to imagine.”
The film demonstrates Ozon’s ability to inveigle unexpected tones into apparently unthreatening material. Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko play two ageing chums in rural France. Shortly after Sagnier, who plays the daughter of Vincent’s character, storms home to Paris the film takes a disturbing swivel.
“I was very excited to get spend some time with him,” she says. “Because he’s a very good friend. So I knew we were going to have fun. And I like the story – this intimate kind of thriller based on two feminine characters who are ageing.”
Let us go back to Sagnier’s annus mirabilis. The anglophone media once was forever on the hunt for the next French “gamine”. That vaguely offensive term covered any young, slim Gallic star who, when the word was first in vogue, offered the Englishman something he thought he couldn’t get from his ration-raised compatriots. It was still around at the start of the century. And, when Sagnier appeared opposite Charlotte Rampling in Ozon’s Swimming Pool, she looked to fit the bill. It seems studios were immediately fanning her with their chequebooks.
I didn’t feel really at ease in Los Angeles – in that competitive environment ... For me, Hollywood was not a dream. I wouldn’t say it was a nightmare. But it was a threat to my security and balance. I was alone. And I didn’t like being alone in hotels
Did she consciously choose to work largely at home in France? Or was that just how the scripts fell?
“That was a personal choice, because at the time – it was way before the #MeToo movement – my character in Swimming Pool was very sexualised,” she says. “That gave me, of course, a lot of opportunities in the States, but not the ones I wanted. It was all about being very sexy. And I was scared of getting lost in all that. When I did Swimming Pool, for me the character was a composition.”
She makes a fascinating comparison with a near-contemporary glamming down to play a murderer.
“I remember the same year Charlize Theron did Monster,” she says. “She got an Oscar for that. I was exactly in the same process – meaning that I was working on my aspect in order to create a part. But for me this very sexy bombshell had nothing to do with who I was. I felt a bit confused that everybody saw me like that.”
On reflection, Sangier is far from the first French actor to resist the temptations of Hollywood after a strong domestic landing. They only occasionally got their mitts on Catherine Deneuve or Jeanne Moreau. The film professionals from that country have a commendable faith in their industry to do worthwhile work. She was, however, lured west to at least test the water.
I was watching the speech of Sean Baker, who was saying that they were closing more and more theatres in America ... In France, this year we have got past the Covid crisis in terms of moviegoers. It’s now stronger than it was before Covid. Maybe French people just like to be told stories
“I didn’t feel really at ease in Los Angeles – in that competitive environment,” Sagnier says. “When I started as an actress, I thought I was going to be in theatre – a stage actor. So it was a bit too much for me. So I decided to focus on art-house movies in France. For me, Hollywood was not a dream. I wouldn’t say it was a nightmare. But it was a threat to my security and balance. I was alone. And I didn’t like being alone in hotels.”
So how have the French managed this? No other country in Europe has such a healthy film industry. She mentions the level of state investment. She mentions the culture. Most important of all, though, is, God bless them, the willing audience.
“The theatres are full!” she says.
Sagnier was impressed – and a little taken aback – by the director of Anora, big winner at this month’s Oscars, pleading with punters to keep attending cinemas.
“I was watching the speech of Sean Baker, who was saying that they were closing more and more theatres in America,” she says, aghast. “He was begging for people to bring their children to the movies. Actually, in France, this year we have got past the Covid crisis in terms of moviegoers. It’s now stronger than it was before Covid. Maybe French people just like to be told stories.”
So off went Sagnier into the fecund world of French cinema. (I forget to ask why she hasn’t yet played herself on the series Call My Agent.) She has three children and is in a relationship with the director Kim Chapiron.
It is in only the past eight years or so that she has taken significant numbers of English-language roles. Thank the rise in quality TV for that. She was the musician Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy opposite Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin in Franklin. She was in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope and The New Pope for HBO.
Is it really true that her role as the socialite Thérésa Cabarrus was cut from Ridley Scott’s Napoleon? I know he shot hours and hours for the thing. But still.
“I know I’m in the long version, so it’s fine,” she says merrily. “And Ridley Scott was so polite, so delightful the way he told me. He wrote to me, and he was so elegant that I couldn’t get offended by it.”
What a trooper.
When Autumn Falls is in cinemas from Friday, March 21st
