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2011 Festival Feature Films (March 24-27)

French actor Aurélien Recoing presents Demain dès l’aube

director Denis Dercourt screenplay Denis Dercourt, Jacques Sotty starring Vincent Perez, Jérémie Rénier, Aurélien Recoing, Anne Marivin
running time 1 h 40 min general audience

Synopsis

A story about the relationship between two brothers … the younger is obsessed with historic battles to the point of being cut off from reality and only existing through role-playing games re-enacting the Napoleonic period. Mathieu, the older, following his mother’s request, tries to entice Paul away from this mysterious and secret world where the border between game and reality doesn’t always exist. To do so, he has no other choice than to also enter into the game.

director/screenwriter
Denis Dercourt

actors/directors
Vincent Perez

Jérémie Rénier

Aurélien Recoing

Interview with director Denis Dercourt

How did you find out about the world of role-playing games described in Tomorrow at Dawn?
Eight years ago, I discovered in a newspaper article the existence of people who, every weekend, dress in costume and recreate as faithfully as possible certain historical periods. The Napoleonic era is the one that is most often re-created. It is a rather secret phenomenon, yet it exists pretty much everywhere in the world. This milieu is not that foreign to me as I am a baroque musician by training, which is also a universe where many elements from the period when the music was played have to be reconstituted. Thus, much in the way baroque musicians use antique instruments, participants in role-playing games develop a very specific knowledge of Napoleonic times, unearthing the language, costumes, weapons and battles among other things.

During the last eight years, you’ve made other films …
It took time for me to determine how I could extract something interesting and film-worthy from this world that is admittedly fascinating, but involves people who are wholly turned toward the past — at times bordering on schizophrenia. It is impossible to find out what players do in their everyday lives. The mania for historical detail (these people have generally done a great deal of research and are very well informed) is coupled with a form of imperviousness to others — when they are no longer hussars, no one should know their identity. Yet, this passion often engulfs their whole existence. The apartments of people we visited in order to borrow accessories or costumes were almost museum-like, as if inhabited by the Napoleonic world. All of this fascinated me and at a certain stage, after having abandoned and then taken up the project again several times, I understood that the strangeness of this phenomenon was just right for the mechanics of a thriller and the tension of a genre film.

Did you mix with these people?
I often went to see re-enactments of battles and their encampments to observe how all of this works. But I never took the step of getting into costume myself. It was also a very difficult thing to put across in the narration, the moment when Mathieu slips on his uniform and passes from one world to the other. His reasons for doing it are complex and may have something to do with the hypnotic dimension of the mask and the costume. It’s a moment of oscillation, a shifting, practically a brief lapse of sanity, which in its way involves the notions of what is real and what is virtual.

How did you structure this material to weave it into the mechanics of a genre movie?
As much as it is a thriller, I wanted my narrative to have the atmosphere of a fairy tale, even if it becomes nightmarish. It shouldn’t be forgotten that this entire universe is based on a game. And so there is something fundamentally childish about it, this wanting to play at being somebody else. When you ask people what pushes them to blur their identity in order to cast themselves as such into hussars, you are dealing with vestiges of childhood, repressed but very much there, deep inside. It is expressed here through an inclination that I believe to be the very base of filmmaking: a taste for disguise.

It’s a more underlying theme, but we can also see in the film a vague analysis of psychological mechanisms upon which the sectarian machine lies.
Yes. The paranoid dimension of secret societies can also be found in the film. It seems to me that this is particularly resonant in the scene where Mathieu bumps into Rogart at the hospital. He is a surgeon-major in the army, but a simple nurse’s aide in real life. He replies to Mathieu: “Nobody must know we are the emperor’s soldiers.” He looks around with suspicion and utters this outrageous sentence, while the scene takes place far from the battlefield re-enactment, in a modern hospital. We can clearly see the hierarchy he has established between his two lives. His real life does not carry a lot of weight next to his dream life.

As a counterpoint to this dimension in your film, there is a family story.
As the film is about a very strange world, there had to be an easy way to identify with the character we are following in response, a character we can become attached to and identify with, and a family story with simple dramatic mechanisms. The story of the relationship between the two brothers constitutes an elaborate situation that is also common enough for everyone to find something of themselves. Besides, there had to be triggers. The trouble in Mathieu’s relationship and the mother’s illness played this role. All of it makes up a story that I wanted to be simple, practically ordinary, so that everyone could identify with it.

What models guided you in writing your film?
Generally, I prefer to speak in terms of musical writing. The outline, the writing of this film has a lot to do with musical composition. It was a matter of alternating tense and relaxed phases over a framework that overall is rather linear, a story that could be carried by a score. I thought a great deal about Ravel when writing, and his hodgepodge of watchmaking mechanics and flavors of childhood that seep through very simply with a great deal of obviousness. The plot of Tomorrow at Dawn is composed around a few salient dramatic touches that are practically immutable, while between these supporting points, I played with the gaps and breaks, narrative spaces that call for the viewer’s participation. It is less about understanding the intrigue than getting involved in it.

And from a visual standpoint?
Above all, the film had to be beautiful, in its scenery, lighting, music, bodies and costumes. This aspect governed the entire process of making the film and, in particular, my collaboration with Antoine Plateau, the head set designer, and Rémy Chevrin, the head cameraman, and then with Jérôme Lemonnier, who wrote the score. In order to understand something of the fascination and seduction that is at work with Mathieu’s character, the film absolutely had to be presented as something very beautiful that develops powerfully, with a certain depth.

Can you speak to us about the actors you chose to interpret the two brothers?
Vincent Perez has several facets that seem very interesting to me. First of all, he is someone who has a complex career path. He is at the same time an actor, director and photographer. Secondly, and this was very important for the film, Vincent is an actor who is very much identified with period films and period costumes, resulting from films such as Queen Margot, Cyrano de Bergerac and The Hunchback. He no longer has a real desire to interpret this type of role today, and in my film particularly, you can feel his reluctance to put the costume on, to blend in with the time period. It corresponds well with him. Additionally, the fact that he has barely been seen on screen these last few years appealed to me. As the subject is strange, I especially didn’t want an actor for the main role who already stars in five films per year. Vincent provided considerable preparation work between training for combat and practicing the piano, which he had never played before. And in the end, in the film, it is he who performs all of the musical pieces and, of course, all of the duels. Very quickly an excellent relationship developed between Jérémie Rénier and Vincent, so good that during the shooting, I was often tempted to make scenes last longer just for the pleasure of filming them together. The further we advanced, the further the story constructed itself around the friendly dimension of the fraternal relationship and to the beauty of the pair on screen. They are both very physical, very focused, very precise actors who are capable of truly surprising things. In response to everything that Vincent was bringing to the film in terms of presence and restraint, it seemed wise to me to ask Jérémie to work on his role’s trajectory in a direction that was practically the opposite, a mixture of fragility and exuberance. His intuition is incredible. From the first take, he was in the role, in the scene. He was completely committed to his character, which was very impressive. And we worked a great deal on the moments when Paul slips on his hussar costume. Once he put on the uniform, he had to suddenly be radiant; he had to give off a beauty that stayed under wrap that stayed hidden until that specific moment.

Tomorrow at Dawn speaks about masks and disguise, and turns out to be a film that unfolds as if masking something. The first scene leads you to believe it is a period film, then someone speaks about a trip to Japan that does not happen. And more generally, the transitional scenes between the two worlds are somewhat disturbing.
This confusion is an aspect of the film that was very important to me and guided me in writing the screenplay. What is also true is that these characters wear a mask all of the time, and just as in The Page Turner, I wanted to play with manipulation, because the film also speaks about that. It brings us back to the opaque structure of these organizations and their possible sectarian outlook. In theory, players establish an impenetrable dividing line between life and the role-playing game. They especially do not want one interfering with the other but obviously, in reality, the two sides contaminate one another. And that gives rise to confusion in which the characters stray, and also possibly the viewer.

This film plays with the idea of games …
There was a type of osmosis during the shoot, which turned out to be very amusing for everyone, without a doubt partly because of this fact. In film, we play at being somebody else, interpreting stories. And in making this story of disguise and invented worlds, about lives that one dreams up and invents, I had the impression of returning to the fundamental elements of moviemaking. On the set, there was more than ever the feeling of play, of the pleasure of designing the bivouac scenes, candlelight dinners and the duels. In the end, it has become quite rare to have to direct duel fights. There were three for this film, and it was an immense pleasure for me. I got hooked on the game