“The Electric Kiss”, an interview with director Pierre Salvadori

Pierre Salvadori‘s eleventh feature film, “The Electric Kiss“, his first period project, set in the roaring 20s, inaugurated the 79th Cannes Film Festival in a flurry of rich visuals and narrative mischief, around a story of death, art, and love where lies, delusions, parallel accounts and intrigues keep piling up, leading the characters in a whirlwind of emotions and discoveries where the trickster may very well be the one who gets tricked.

The idea for this film – starring Pio Marmaï as the bereaved painter who is duped into thinking he can reunite with his regretted wife (Vimala Pons) through an exploited circus performer (Anaïs Demoustier) who just happened to be there when the inconsolable widower was looking for a medium to communicate with her, and is encouraged to keep up the lie by the artist’s friend and agent (Gilles Lellouche) – came from a note to Salvadori actor made by Rebecca Zlotowski when she was directing him in her “Planetarium”, ten years ago.

The French director (whose credits include “White Lies“, “In the Courtyard“, and “The Trouble with you“, amongst others) explains how this suggestion led to the choice of that specific period in time and these rich, often theatre-like settings (without the film ever being anything other than very cinematic in its cinematography, rhythm and movement), and describes how he progressively constructed the script (together with Benjamin Charbit and Benoît Graffin, based on an original idea by Zlotowski and Robin Campillo). 

However obsessed with the multiplicity of stories which can derive from the same events (as truth is something quite elusive in Salvadori’s films, very playfully so, if it exists at all, at least under the form of an account), the director underlines that they mostly interest him for the mise-en-scène they call for: “In film, you have to make believe, and that’s when the directing part comes in.” 

“The Electric Kiss” brought about a new realisation for Pierre Salvadori: “If I’m gonna have a story, I’s gonna have a story which is meaningful, but with this movie, I realised I had very much a character-driver story on my hands. When Rebecca told me that, I thought ‘Oh my god, these people are going to turn on each other and they are going to produce a lot of fiction.’ There won’t be new things coming in, no surprises: they were going to create the script just by being together in front of the camera.”

“All the subject matters are brought about by the characters,” he continues, “I will not make any more movies starting with an idea I want to talk about, a guiding subject matter: I will let all my characters be themselves and the subjects will surface through them, and it’s exactly what happened with this movie. You have this woman, you have this fake psychic, and this painter, and suddenly you’re talking about money and art, about friendship and betrayal, about personal interest and the fight between the desire to be good and the desire to be rich.” 

We also talk about fate and love, muses and Pygmalions and artistic inspiration.

 

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