TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Escapes

And the Little Prince Said

Le Petit Prince a dit

Christine Pascal
1992 - France / Switzerland - 1h45

Screenings : thursday 25 - 8:30 pm - Grand Théâtre - presented by Louis Mathieu - film teacher

Raised by her grandmother, Violette only sees her divorced parents every other weekend. She begins to have headaches and goes for a medical. Her father, a doctor, discovers that his daughter has got a brain tumour and that she doesn't have long to live. He takes her away and they go off on the road …

“I started making films as an actress (...). I directed my first film, Félicité, with innocence, to try and find a place for myself in the cinema. The film was so focused on me and narrow in its inspiration that it put me in a very minority position, especially since in 1978 I was one of the first actresses to go into directing.” (Interview with Christine Pascal; Frédéric Strauss and Camille Taboulay, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1992.) Fourteen years later, with Le Petit Prince a dit (And the Little Prince Said), Christine Pascal succeeds in finding the alchemy so sought after in French cinema: an auteur film (Directors' Fortnight, Prix Louis-Delluc) which works with audiences (800,000 entries). Her inspiration focuses on a troubling desire: “I wanted to talk about the relationship between a father and his daughter who is no longer a child but not yet a woman, that ambiguous age where incest is no longer possible, but where the idea of incest is still confusingly present. I wanted these two bodies, an adult man of my generation with a young girl.” But when the film was released, she had a more “generational” reading of her film, evoking the AIDS epidemic, talking about all the people she had seen dying so young and so quickly. “From such a hard subject, Christine Pascal has made a gentle film, a tragedy, she has made a film about love. Avoiding all the traps of the genre (melodrama with a sick child and parents wracked with pain), keeping away from the tear-jerker, she creates a deep and complex work on the inevitable, on filial relationships, on the way adversity changes people and on what a young girl can do when faced with her own death.” (Jean-Sébastien Chauvin; dossier Collège au Cinéma)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Richard Berry, Anémone, Marie Kleiber
Screenplay : Robert Boner, Christine Pascal
Cinematography : Pascal Marti
Sound : Jean-Pierre Laforce, Dominique Vieillard
Editing : Jacques Comets
Music : Bruno Coulais

Production : Alia Film, Ciné Manufacture, French Productions

French distributor : Gaumont