UNA FIAMMA NEL MIO CUORE

 
Myriam Mézières and the (denied) mathematics of roles
Valerio Carando

Myriam Mézières, actress, screenwriter, film director, author, singer, and performer. Holder of a French passport, but stateless by vocation. A cherished presence for those who keep on investigating the work of the gruff, very vital outsiders who contributed to forge the history of seventies’ counterculture. Mézières was as unforgettable in Fernando Arrabal’s I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (1973), co-starring with Emmanuelle Riva and George Shannon, as she was in two absolute masterpieces by Paul Vecchiali, i.e., Don't Change Hands (1975), a bold experiment with some transgender flair, precariously poised between musical, hardcore, and art-house noir; and Drugstore Romance (1979), an ardent melodrama of love and death that recalls and adapts the narrative archetypes of a certain avant-guerre poetic realism.
In 1976, once principal photography of Spermula - an erotic sci-fi para-situationist movie signed by Charles Matton - was completed, Mézières was struck by a crucial encounter. Alain Tanner tailored for her the Madeleine in Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), which quickly went down in history as the manifesto-film of post-1968 Utopianism, “an educational movie without lectures, an encyclopaedic film without an ending” (Serge Daney). Jonah was followed, twenty years on, by No Man’s Land (1985), a both rigorous and heartrending fable on the irrationality of borders on earth, and a film poised “between two choices […]. Between life and death, the earth and the clouds, day and night. Between two customs offices in no man’s land, on the French-Swiss border. Between me and cinema, the cinema and the escape from cinema” (Alain Tanner). On these two early films, the Tanner-Mézières relationship envisaged a distribution of roles that would not infringe the codes imposed by a classic hierarchical division: the former writes and directs, the latter acts. Another frontier, however, within the modes of production, was on the verge of collapsing.
Alain Tanner used to classify his works in two different operative categories: on one hand, films that derive from an idea; on the other hand, films that arise from the fascination for a performer. La Vallée fantôme (1987) deals precisely with a film director – played by Jean-Louis Trintignant – desperately seeking an actress who could inspire him with a story. Said and done: during the same period in which he was tackling the project of La Vallée, which at some point was delayed due to problems of force majeure, Alain crossed Myriam’s path again, and let his creative approach take a drastic detour. A Flame in My Heart (1987) is the film of a “double alliance.” Mézières herself came up with the story, reworking slices of life drawn directly from her mother’s eventful biography: the intimate, secret diary of two overwhelming passions inside which the roles of victim and tormentor are seamless. Tanner watches the story from the sidelines, almost without interfering, establishing a dialogue with a narrative space that he feels both alien to his own temperament and fatally attracted to. In other terms, Mézières led the Genevan filmmaker to develop a direct, disruptive relationship unmediated by conceptual sublimations with the extreme tangibility of the body: flesh, sweat, teardrops, blood. A journey into the bowels of the world-within whose value is certainly not secondary compared to the value of films such as Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), The Salamander (1971), Return from Africa (1973), Jonah, or In the White City (1983): “Myriam has arrived at the right moment. Her proposal has seduced me. Her idea let me into a ground that I could never have explored alone, and anyway not in this way, i.e., the ground of love and passion. I managed to put my world aside, however briefly. This for me was also a breath of fresh air which at that time I surely needed […]. It’s simply about believing in the body. Giving voice to the body and thus reaching the body before speech […], before things are even named” (Alain Tanner).
Tanner-Mézières, a communion destined to reject the mathematics of roles and demolish the fences that separate reality and representation, simulation and truth: who is leading whom? This is an enigma that won’t allow any attempt to solve it. A Flame in My Heart is the first film – to be followed by two, equally paradigmatic, more: The Diary of Lady M. (1993) and Fleurs de sang (2002) – in which the apparently distant worlds of a film director (who was not only a director) and an actress (who is not only an actress) blended and confused with each other, in-between shreds of autobiography and slivers of imagination. Enjoy the screening.

Réalisation : Alain Tanner
SCENEGGIATURA : Alain Tanner, Myriam Mézières
DOP : Acácio de Almeida
CAST: Myriam Mézières, Aziz Kabouche, Benoit Régent, Biana, Jean-Yves Bertelot
Distribution : Regina Films
Durée : 110’
Langue : Français
Production : Garance, La Sept Cinéma, Filmograph SA