Last Wednesday, André Bonzel was the guest of the 50th La Rochelle Film Festival, for a special screening of It happened close to you, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Belvaux’s cult film, Bonzel and Poelvoorde. It is therefore in a virtual way that we exchanged with the French filmmaker, to evoke his very beautiful second feature film, And I love to fury (see opposite), which is released this Wednesday in Brussels, Liège, Namur and Charleroi.
Editing film, mixing Bonzel’s family archives and the amateur films he has been collecting for years, And I love to fury was born from the desire to “to finally be able to make a film”following several failed projects. “I also wanted to share my passion for amateur films, which do not interest a lot of people, apart from sociologistsexplains the filmmaker. Whereas, for me, they are real cinematographic objects. These are people who film their lives; there is nothing cinematically equivalent. It’s a bit like the Light side of this scientific instrument which serves to record reality and to reproduce it and which, by that very fact, encapsulates time. Also, amateurs usually film people they love. And I find that the feelings experienced for people stay a little in the movies…”
Capturing fleeting happiness
For Bonzel, when you take out your cell phone today to capture a fleeting moment of happiness, it’s still the same approach as in the days of film… “What drives us to want to film? In my opinion, it’s to keep the moments that we love, that we live. By extension, it’s linked to death, to the fact of knowing that these images will perhaps survive us…reflects the filmmaker. The relationship to time fascinated me. I didn’t see myself growing up, getting old… Time passes without us realizing it. This dimension is haunting. And there, precisely, there is also this fact that things do not really change. The appearance of things, clothes, cars change… But the human condition, even if there has been social progress, is the same. This is also what is fascinating. Each time, when there are people on the films, I wonder what their life was like…”
To unite all these scraps of existence, drawn from the life of his family or anonymous people, Bonzel opted for an autobiographical story full of fantasy. “I wanted to tell my life using the images of others when I didn’t have my own, precisely to see what was common, universalhe explains. Afterwards, I really talk regarding my food problems, my obsession with girls in adolescence… I open myself up. From the moment you tell your life story, you have to be sincere.”
To bring these silent images to life, Bonzel notably called on Benjamin Biolay. They met through his co-producers from Les Films du Poisson, who had produced Pain by Emmanuel Finkiel in 2018, superb adaptation of Marguerite Duras by, with Mélanie Thierry in which played the French actor and musician, who had nevertheless sworn that he would no longer write film music. “We showed him a first end-to-end that I had edited alone, which was supposed to be 2:30, telling him that the film would be shorter on arrival. He liked it a lot and he said to me: ‘I do !’ Then, he invested a lot. He composed more than 65 very eclectic pieces: there is jazz, pop…”welcomes the director, who gave carte blanche to the composer. “If we go looking for Biolay, we have to let him be inspired by the images. And the images inspired him a lot. At the start, he was not supposed to make songs, but as he really liked the project, as we had sympathized , he wrote songs, which he didn’t have to do by contract. It was a gift.”
The Ghost of “It Happened”
Looking back on his life, the 61-year-old filmmaker obviously comes back to his meeting with Rémy Belvaux and Benoît Poelvoorde and the shock wave caused by It happened close to you 30 years ago. “Before Cannes, I was convinced that we had something, in any case that Benoît was going to exploderecalls Bonzel. We were shooting on film. We looked at the silent rushes to see if it was the image. And even without the sound, the way he moved was amazing. While editing the film, we knew that we had something that held up a bit. Even if, followingwards, you never know; there are plenty of good films that go unnoticed…” This was clearly not the case for It happened close to you which, in 1992, created an immediate buzz on the Croisette. Bonzel has mixed memories of the Cannes Film Festival. “It was good and bad at the same time, because the film escaped us. Making the film was easier than knowing what to do with it followingwards, how to manage the distribution… Which later turned out to be a real disaster .”
Indeed, if Poelvoorde instantly became a star, for his two friends, managing the post-It happened was much more difficult. “There are a lot of things. First, for several years, we had lawsuits, we tried to recover the money that we had never seen. And then, for two years, we still went to all the festivals on the planet. We traveled a lot. When we went to New York, it was the first time that Benoît took the plane. It took a long time. Afterwards, it’s complicated. At one point , I left for the United States. And then time passed. I tried to set up projects which were not made. I made children. And since I was non-existent in the eyes of my father, I wanted not to reproduce that and be close to my children. For me, things happen as they are. Maybe I didn’t have enough desire to make films. For that, you have to fight … At one point, I had a project with Benoît that didn’t happen. And Benoît wasn’t very present…”regrets André Bonzel.
Thirty years later, the relationship between the two former pals is still pretty “complicated”. “It’s very changeable… It depends on his condition and the circumstances. You can fall into each other’s arms as much as you can argue. I had gone to see him to borrow money to digitize the films. I had showed a little screen test. And he had encouraged me to do it. He lent me a little money, which he’s not regarding to see once more, by the way… But not the amount he wanted me to. had said…”
Whereas today, the management of the rights of It happened close to you is finally clarified and that the film is once more visible (in particular on Prime Video), André Bonzel intends to give a second life to the cult film of Belgian cinema. “We are going to restore it. The original camera negative has been lost. The lab in Holland, the only lab that did black and white, has gone bankrupt. In this case, the lab sends you a letter asking you to come and recover the equipment. As we didn’t really have a production company, I think the letter arrived at Benoît’s and we never received it… But we have the 35 mm inflation, which is at Éclair and we’re going to restore, then redo a good quality digital scan. We’ll see who we do it with, but we have to do it for the film to last… We wanted to do it for the 30th anniversary, but since I was stuck with my film , we didn’t have time”, confides the director, rejoicing in a future release of the film in theaters. Because “It’s on the big screen that you have to see it!”
