PostED ON 15 OCTOBER 2022

As an actress or filmmaker, she has never failed to deliver personal, sensual, elegant and immersive works.

As a child, people often thought she spoke too fast. Though she is no longer a youngster, her flow has retained its high-speed cadence. Nicole Garcia still enjoys talking as much as ever, but her expressions are always meaningful, warm, pictorial and punctuated by countless incidents: a memory here, an idea there, which quickly leads to another. She tirelessly pursues the appropriate word.

These words, with the collaboration of Jacques Fieschi, her co-writer, carry a significant impact in the films she has directed. From Every Other Weekend (1990) to The Lovers (2020), Nicole Garcia's cinema explores like few others why life is worth nothing... and why nothing is worth life.

In an interview with Le Monde last year, she revealed that her mother had let her enrol at the Oran Conservatory, precisely to tame her hurried speech. However, the memories she evoked in the process of the interview also claimed the opposite, describing the ‘muzzled’ exit from her teenage years. The theatre has allowed her to make her voice heard, as she remarked, "If I can't speak for myself, I can speak with words other than my own".

She recalls exactly the street corner in Oran she was at when she came home from school and dared to declare for the first time, "I will be an actress". She was thirteen, and her French teacher, Monique Rivet, whose influence would prove decisive, complimented and encouraged her talent for recitation. "She had seen Gérard Philipe act," so she sought every opportunity for contact, even to the point of confessing her devotion. "She had a moment's hesitation, as if frightened by its influence.” Years later, with Algeria well in the rear-view mirror, the name of the teacher she thought she had forgotten returned to her in a flash when she discovered her name on the list among those accepted to the Conservatory of Paris.

For Garcia, theatre roles quickly poured in. The cinema was hardly on her radar. But soon directors such as Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais saw her on stage, which was somewhat enticing to her. Bertrand Tavernier was the first major director to pull her into the cinema spotlight in 1975. In Let Joy Reign Supreme, her role as the saucy madam at the court of Philippe d'Orléans piqued the interest of other filmmakers. However, it would take years for her to consider moving from theatre to films as a natural transition, as she acknowledged in 2014 during a master class at the Forum des images. "I made many of my first films being a bit ‘disconnected’, forever glancing at my watch because I knew I had to be at the theatre that evening."

Over time, she came to enjoy the ‘narcissistic satisfaction’ the movies brought her. Even more so when she was cast alongside some of the most popular actors of the time: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Body of My Enemy), Lino Ventura (Un papillon sur l'épaule), Yves Montand (Waiter!).

The idea of directing was still far off but took shape after shooting My American Uncle under the direction of Alain Resnais, who made her aware of the ‘undertaking’ involved in creating a film. A first short (15 August 1986), selected at the Cannes Film Festival, convinced her to open a new chapter. The words of others were finally followed by her own to express the emotional vulnerabilities of her characters. It is especially through her remarkable portraits of women who have been ‘upended’, as she puts it, that she has left her mark: Nathalie Baye (Every Other Weekend), Catherine Deneuve (Place Vendome), Marion Cotillard (From the Land of the Moon).  "Something about the madness of women appeals to me, when they carry within them a fragility, a possible tipping point... sometimes even a risk of catastrophe". All these heroines reflect Garcia and have helped her come to terms with where she comes from, a fact confirmed when she is asked what the purpose of cinema is: "To grow up", she says.

Carlos Gomez

Three Sunday screenings:

From the Land of the Moon by Nicole Garcia (Mal de pierres, 2016, 2h01, VFSTA)
UGC Confluence Sun. 16 11:15am

Every Other Weekend by Nicole Garcia (Un week-end sur deux, 1990, 1h37)
Institut Lumière Sun. 16 2:45pm

A Captain’s Honor by Pierre Schoendoerffer (L’Honneur d’un capitaine, 1982, 1h57)
UGC Confluence Sun. 16 6:45pm