‘Marvelous Mornings’, an interview with director Avril Besson and actresses India Hair and Raya Martigny

Avril Besson, who just presented her first feature, “Marvelous Mornings” (original title: “Les Matins merveilleux”), amongst the Special Screenings of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, is full of surprises – and “the funniest person I know”, adds her lead actress India Hair. Who would have thought that the sad event which sets her character in motion happened to her in the same, wacky way, and that she would succeed so well in her resolve to turn that grief into a comedy – to “put some fun into it”.

As the French director (and contender for the Camera d’Or) revealed when we met her and India Hair on the Croisette – an already merry duo made even merrier by actress Raya Martigny‘s joining us mid-interview –, many of the key elements in the profoundly existential and human, but also quirky and indeed fun tale she tells here were borrowed from real life, including the disco geek played by Eric Cantona and the trans waitress embodied with utter charisma by Raya Martigny.

At the centre of the story is a terrific character, a slightly candid and reserved but always open-minded and ready-to-try young woman which offers us the opportunity to finally discover India Hair in a lead role, much to our delight. “[Charlie] had been with me for while, says the actress, because I’ve been there since the beginning of the [writing] process, so she’s part of me. For me, she’s a mixture of Avril’s fun, outgoing nature – and she put a lot of that in Charlie – and also there’s a lot of childhood in there. She makes me think of a child who is open to meeting people, to experiences, and who has no prejudgements, so she just looks at people with tenderness, and I find that incredibly important, and it helped me, in my life, to look at things with more tenderness.”

We talk about the film’s very well written, fun, and slightly absurd script and dialogues, about Avril Besson and India Hair‘s collaboration, about the title of the movie, borrowed from a song, about the need to reset.

Raya Martigny joins us, and starts by underlining how well she felt represented by the trans woman character Avril Besson created: “The world just wants us to be one way, and it’s always about identity, when our life is in fact not just about this: we fall in love, we walk down the street, we are just normal people too, and that’s what we need to show more, and that’s what we do in this movie: it’s just not about identity, it’s about emancipation between two women and just acceptance and love and so many beautiful things that are important in life.” Avril Besson chimes in and suggests that by taking out the violence and the identity aspect, she is “much more in the reality of being transgender”, pointing out that the real-life counterpart of the character of Marina “lives a beautiful life, exactly like any other woman, and it’s exactly when you start taking the violence out of the equation that you can see the people’s hearts.” “If you’re just talking about how someone reacts to violence,” she adds, “you can’t see their heart and the beauty that’s in it, and I really wanted to see the beauty.”

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