Heartbeat

"I have been lucky enough to be able to film the cleaning and restoration work on a painting by Pierre Bonnard: Nu dans la baignoire. I completely inhabited this canvas. It drew me to it and allowed me to record the palpable cinematic evidence of Bonnard's art of painting. It has led me along the hidden path of his private life." (Alain Cavalier)

Toilets, loos, lavatories, bogs and johns were places of refuge when I was young. Along with the end of the garden. I thought I had secrets, thoughts and things others must not know. Else danger.Confident solitude, well-being, required a door you could lock. And still today. I became a fi lm-maker. Toilets were made to be fi lmed. Straightforward and functional, endlessly different, the size, the angles, the sounds, everything about them begged to be caught and canned. For one of my fi lms, I asked the Railway Board to transport the components of a genuine train lavatory into the studio. I’ve rarely been near a toilet, public or private, without locking myself in with my camera. In the hope that some invisible connection between spirit of place and my sense of the day will germinate.

The life of little St. Therese of Lisieux, depicted in minimalist vignettes. Therese and her sisters are all nuns in a Carmelite convent. Her devotion to Jesus and her concept of "the little way" to God are shown clearly, using plain modern language. A sense of angelic simplicity comes across without fancy lights, choirs, or showy miracles.

In this drama that alludes to the Algerian War with France of the 1960s, Thomas is a deserter from the French Foreign Legion who is on the run from authorities. He helps damsel in distress Dominique, who has been taken hostage by a group of terrorists. Thomas is wounded but manages to escape after killing the guard who inflicted the injury. Dominique gives Thomas money to escape to France after he secures her freedom, but he is caught between the Foreign Legion and the terrorists seeking revenge.

“I have on occasion experienced filmmaking as an intensely shared activity. Lively friendships result and remain. Filming that affection today is no act of nostalgia. Paths once crossed make things simple. People who have been behind the camera, or in front of it, giving the movie their all, are without illusion.” (Alain Cavalier)

During a year, they would meet and film each other. The filmmaker and the actor, the President and his prime minister, Alain Cavalier and Vincent Lindon. In Pater, you will see them in real life and in the fiction that they invented together.

"If I get along well with someone, if I am attracted to what that person does, then I have an annoying tendency to desire to film that person. I get rejected or not. It sometimes happens that ones has a change of heart after saying yes. The shoot can last years or simply an afternoon. So I stock a lot of films that I edit, that I abandon or eventually take up again. And then, simple pleasure in the middle of disorder, four films come together merely to form one. Without any of the persons who make up the ensemble ever meeting." (Alain Cavalier)

René, a children's theater performer, has a problem : he is a hearty eater and he weighs no less than 155 kilos. After being abandoned by his girlfriend, René decides to go on a diet, notably to reconquer her. It is also an opportunity for him to question his former lifestyle and to define new values...