In the 7th arrondissement of Paris, Roxane Mesquida and Sophie Levy present their first collaboration, in the privacy of a small art house cinema on this October evening. The assembly has just discovered Méduse, the director’s first feature film. The latter, shot in 24 days three years ago, was unfortunately seriously injured by the pandemic. A delay coupled with a traffic jam of films to distribute – even though it was rewarded with around forty prizes at festivals around the world Finally, the big screen was able to welcome Méduse. A camera full of tension between two sisters who are trying to love and hate each other. Clémence, the youngest, played by Anamaria Vartolomei, suffers from a physical handicap which confines her to the huge family home where she lives alone with her older sister Romane, played by Roxane Mesquida. Each tries to emancipate herself from the other. , especially when Guillaume arrives (Arnaud Valois), a firefighter in love with Romane who imposes on himself the mission of helping Clémence to reduce her handicap, stinging her sister’s jealousy to the point of implosion. An intimate film, paranoid and bewitching carried by its two actresses. To see also on Konbini“From my five years, I was told that I looked like Romy Schneider““The characters who are tortured or not very sympathetic will always be the ones I want to play ”, explains Roxane to the spectators, before continuing: “I don’t find the reverse interesting. Playing someone who sinks into madness and jealousy makes me want to. But the main reason why I made this film is Sophie, I would have said yes to anything coming from her. There are directors who force things and who don’t let go with the emotions that arise. With Sophie, it’s the opposite. Already it was not excessively intellectual, we did not talk about the character for three hours. It was a mesmerizing atmosphere, a very special working environment where the whole team was in symbiosis.”Sophie Levy met her muse more than ten years ago. She had sent her her first script idea in the hope that she would accept to play one of the roles. Although this first film never saw the light of day, a friendship nourished by admiration was born between the two women. Fascinating directors is what forged the career of Roxane Mesquida, whose deep and a room at a glance. She was 13 when she was spotted by Manuel Pradal who was preparing the film Marie Baie des Anges, while she was walking with her mother in her village in the South of France. In a casting carried out on the side of the road, Roxane is hired. Yet far from her the idea of being an actress, on the contrary. Strangely, on all my birthdays, I was offered books about his life, of which I knew, suddenly, the tragic end. I thought all actresses committed suicide, I told myself it must be a horrible job.” a third of her life on film sets, from Gossip Girl to Kaboom!, including films by Quentin Dupieux, Alexandra Cassavetes and Kim Chapiron. This rambling, radical, intriguing and rich filmography, Roxane first owes it to a meeting: the one with the director Catherine Breillat at the end of the 1990s, author of several very sulphurous films, such as Romance, with Rocco Siffredi. But don’t say that word to Roxane, who collaborated with her three times during the 2000s, in To my sister!, Sex Is Comedy and An old mistress. In each film, all disturbing in their own way, Roxane shoots a scene where she gets deflowered. Another kind of coming of age cinema. Not too difficult ? “The difficulty is in the boredom”, she confides in an interview in 2008, “not at all in the interpretation of a character, especially when you work with Catherine”. Roxane has absolute confidence in Catherine Breillat, which French critics considered very controversial at the time. Even today, the actress speaks about it with passion when a spectator speaks to her about these 20-year-old films: “Catherine did not force the unfolding of a scene. Sometimes while filming, things that they hadn’t written came out naturally and she kept them.” The director gave her almost premonitory advice: “Making a film with me is not a plus but a minus. Learn English and go to the US, they will love you there“. That’s exactly what happened. Barely landed in Los Angeles, Roxane meets a director with whom she dreams of shooting, Gregg Araki. He offers her the role of Lorelei in the delirious Kaboom!. Not bad for the first project across the Atlantic for the young Frenchwoman. But it was with Gossip Girl that Roxane Mesquida’s career took a popular and completely new turn. In a few episodes where she plays a fictional member of the royal family of Monaco, she becomes the Frenchie who lives the American dream in the eyes of the French, as she explained, still at TF6: “As there was no cinema in my village, I watched a lot of TV series as a child, I was obsessed with it. To turn in a series, it was a dream. It will be its only parenthesis also general public, but not of the least since today still, one speaks to him about the series. After playing a Monegasque princess, Roxane settled permanently in Los Angeles where she lived for a time in the former residence of Charlie Chaplin. She alternates between French films and American productions and collaborates a second time with Gregg Araki for the crazy series Now Apocalypse, when she is not working with Quentin Dupieux (we have seen her in Rubber, Wrong Cops and Reality).Completely free, unpredictable and uninhibited in her choice of role, Roxane Mesquida is above all a lover of cinema, follower of the Letterboxd application for cinephiles, so much so that she offers a little scoop to the spectators of the Reflet Médicis cinema on this mild October evening: she wrote a screenplay. “I’ve been doing this job for 28 years and I recently realized that I envy directors more than other actors. With this return to France, I hope to be able to carry out my film project… and shoot some here, because I missed French cinema a lot.”
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