Immersed in the iceberg of French cinema, Léa Mysius, 33, is already a regular on the Croisette. A graduate of the screenplay section of La Fémis, she has brought her pen to the screenplays of the greatest: André Téchiné, Claire Denis, who is presenting the fruit of their collaboration Stars at Noon this year at Cannes, Arnaud Desplechin, who gave her the desire to write for the cinema when she was a teenager, or even Jacques Audiard, who called on her and Céline Sciamma to script Les Olympiades, his younger, more feminine and more Parisian cinematographic turn. “In my childhood, it was the books that were sacred and not the films. But, as a teenager, that changed, in particular thanks to the films of Arnaud Desplechin, with which I realized that we could make literature in the cinema. It changed my perspectives.”Through her work as a screenwriter, Léa Mysius puts her ideas, her reading, her memories and her observations at the service of the directors she admires. And the more stories she invents, the more she feels she still has to invent.” But I’ve always separated writing for myself and for someone. I can give everything to a director now that I’ve understood that I don’t give ideas that could be in my films. You shouldn’t work with vampire directors who take your sap rather than your technique.”Her personal obsessions, her sap, therefore, she guard for her films. Because in 2015, the screenwriter went to the tip of the iceberg, and after three short films, she officially became a director by signing Ava, her first noticed feature film. In the casting, we find Noée Abita with her first appearance on screen: it’s a revelation. This year, she transforms the essay and confirms that she is a talent of French cinema to follow closely with The Five Devils, a story of family secrets seen through the eyes of a child, presented at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes. She is even waiting for other projects to be offered to her, such as comedies. When she is behind the camera, on the other hand, it is a universe of her own that she deploys, a universe of fantastic tales which takes root in the five senses and the four elements and populated by enigmatic children with disabilities or overdeveloped. In his first three short films, Cadavre exquis, Les Oiseaux-tonnerre and L’Île jaune, he was already talking about a little girl fascinated by a corpse, a limping twin, an incestuous twin and a disfigured-faced teenager exiled to a disturbing island. Léa Mysius then did not escape the unspoken rule that the first films are frequently at the height of children, a period of life on which each filmmaker has hindsight and which she finds very beautiful when she is not is not watered down.” This obsession with strange children comes from a feeling that I had to be a little different, but like all children, I think. I did not have a disability, but I I’m very inhabited by my childhood and I have several childish figures from literature and cinema who marked me. But I’m going to grow up and make adult films now!” In Ava, she chronicled the great holidays in blue and yellow of an enigmatic teenager who is gradually losing her sight. In Les Cinq Diables, she films Vicky, a little girl endowed with an overdeveloped sense of smell, transported by smells to the past of her mother, lifeguard and fallen Miss Rhône-Alpes, whom she adores. sea, the director moved in the cold and the landscapes both suffocating and grandiose of a landlocked valley of the Alps. They also allowed him to film France differently and to incorporate more assumed social issues into it, in a genre film anchored in the reality of the French countryside, a bit like Teddy by the Boukherma brothers. Si, in his first short films, she chose cinegenic physical handicaps, a limp or a burn, for example, for her feature films, Léa Mysius chose to work on the senses, in perdition or overdeveloped, less palpable and therefore much more difficult to put on stage, but from which result highly sensory films. In this one, we find the volcano Adèle Exarchopoulos, an actress with a sensoriality that cannot be explained. “I am often asked if I am going to deal with the five senses. touch runs through all my films.” In Ava, a lot of photography work has been done to represent this vision which, little by little, disappears. In The Five Devils, it was about filming the invisible, fluids, smells that summon memories, solicit memory and allow little Vicky to travel in time and reveal the hidden images of the life of her mother. By mixing naturalism and fantasy, Léa Mysius questions, with her very own way, the weight of family secrets that are passed on to subsequent generations. And whether she becomes an adult or remains stuck in childhood, she is a talent to watch closely.
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