Private Fears in Public Places (film)
Encyclopedia
Private Fears in Public Places is the English-language title of Cœurs (tr. "Hearts"), a 2006 French film directed by Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...

. It was adapted from Alan Ayckbourn
Alan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE is a prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their...

's play Private Fears in Public Places
Private Fears in Public Places
Private Fears in Public Places is a 2004 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The bleakest play written by Ayckbourn for many years, it intimately follows a few days in the lives of six characters, in four tightly-interwoven stories through 54 scenes.In 2006, it was made into a film Cœurs,...

. The film won several awards, including a Silver Lion
Silver Lion
The Leone d’Argento refers to a number of awards presented at the Venice Film Festival. The Silver Lion is awarded irregularly and have gone through several changes of purpose. Until 1995, Silver Lions were infrequently awarded to a number of films as second prize for those nominated for the...

 at the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

.

Background

For the second time in his career Alain Resnais turned to an Alan Ayckbourn play for his source material (having previously adapted another play for Smoking/No Smoking
Smoking/No Smoking
Smoking/No Smoking is a 1993 French movie. It was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, from the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn...

), and remained close to the original structure while transferring the setting and milieu from provincial England to the 13th arrondissement of Paris (contrary to his usual preference).

The film consists of over 50 short scenes, usually featuring two characters - occasionally three or just one. Scenes are linked by dissolves featuring falling snow, a device similar to one which Resnais previously used in L'Amour à mort
L'amour à mort
L'amour à mort is a 1984 film directed by Alain Resnais.The film was shot in Uzès, Gard, in the south of France.-Cast:* Sabine Azéma - Elisabeth Sutter* Fanny Ardant - Judith Martignac* Pierre Arditi - Simon Roche...

(1984).

Several of Resnais's regular actors appear in the film (Arditi, Azéma, Dussollier, Wilson), and he was joined by his longstanding technical collaborators in design and editing, but he worked for the first time with cinematographer Éric Gautier.

The fictional TV programmes called "Ces chansons qui ont changé ma vie" which feature in the film were directed by Bruno Podalydès.

Synopsis

In contemporary Paris, six characters individually confront their emotional solitude as their lives intertwine. Dan (Lambert Wilson
Lambert Wilson
Lambert Wilson is a French actor. He is internationally known for his portrayal of The Merovingian in The Matrix He was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the son of Georges Wilson, who was an actor, theatrical manager and director of the Theatre National de Paris.Wilson screen tested for The...

) is unemployed after being sacked from the army and spends his time drinking in a bar and telling his troubles to the longsuffering barman Lionel (Pierre Arditi
Pierre Arditi
Pierre Arditi was born on 1 December 1944 in Paris, child of the French paintor Georges Arditi , from Marseille, and a Belgian mother. He is an award-winning French film and stage actor...

). Dan's relationship with Nicole (Laura Morante
Laura Morante
Laura Morante is an Italian film actress.She was born in Santa Fiora, province of Grosseto , and is the niece of renowned Italian novelist Elsa Morante.-Career:...

) is disintegrating and through a newspaper advertisement he meets Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré
Isabelle Carré
Isabelle Carré is a French actress, who has appeared in more than 40 films since 1989. She won a César Award for Best Actress for her role in Se souvenir des belles choses , and has been nominated a further six times, for Beau fixe , Le Hussard sur le toit , La Femme défendue , Les Sentiments ,...

), an attractive but insecure young woman who lives with her older brother Thierry (André Dussollier
André Dussollier
André Dussollier is a French actor.-Filmography:* 1970 : Ils, directed by Jean-Daniel Simon* 1972 : Les Chemins de pierre, directed by Joseph Drimal...

). Thierry is an estate agent who has been trying to find a new apartment for Nicole and Dan. He works with Charlotte (Sabine Azéma
Sabine Azéma
Sabine Azéma is a French actress. Born in Paris, she graduated from the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and began her film career in 1975...

), a middle-aged spinster and an ardent Christian, who lends him a video of an evangelical TV programme to give him inspiration. At the end of the video, Thierry discovers some unerased footage of erotic dancing by a woman he suspects to be Charlotte, and, taking this as an invitation, one day he tries to force her to kiss him in their office. Charlotte in her spare time works as a carer, and is assigned to look after the bed-ridden and foul-mouthed Arthur (the voice of Claude Rich
Claude Rich
Claude Rich is a French actor. He began his career as a theater actor, before his film debut in 1955 with René Clair, Les Grandes Manoeuvres.He married the actress Catherine Renaudin on 26 June 1959...

) in the evenings so that his dutiful son, who is Lionel the barman, can go to work. After enduring repeated vicious tantrums from Arthur, Charlotte one evening dons a leather porno outfit and silences him with a striptease performance, before resuming her usual pious demeanour. Arthur is hospitalised next day. Gaëlle witnesses a farewell meeting between Dan and Nicole, and interpreting it as a betrayal by Dan, she flees back home to her brother. Lionel and Nicole both pack up to begin new lives. Dan resumes his place at the bar.

Reception

On its release, Private Fears in Public Places received an overwhelmingly positive response in the French press,
whereas the enthusiasm of the public was more measured although respectably reflected at the box-office.

British and American critics were widely sympathetic towards the film, but showed more reservations about the significance of the work.

Comments by reviewers ranged from "disappointing" and "inconsequential", to "exquisite comedy-drama" , and "a masterpiece by any measure".

One of the aspects noted by Anglo-American reviewers was the deliberate theatricality in the style of filming: "The film is entirely shot on sets that advertise their staginess - for example by the absence of ceilings revealed by the overhead shots, or their striking pastel colours (pinks, oranges and whites) and the repetition of frames filled with seemingly shifting partitions: etched glass, beads, ironwork, veils and so on." "...The superbly sustained aura of delicate artifice – this is a Paris where it’s always silently snowing, even, at one point, indoors – lends the characters’ repeated attempts to break free of their boxed-in lives the ritualistic magic of a fairy tale."

This mise-en-scène was also linked to the themes of loneliness and separation: "Resnais is far more interested in the divisions that set us apart - whether it is the ill-constructed inner wall that bisects the first apartment visited by Nicole, the curtain that splits Lionel's bar in two, the partition that separates Thierry's office from Charlotte's, or the thematic oppositions of heaven and hell, men and women, piety and temptation." "All of [the characters] are in search of love and companionship. They're deeply lonely, though none is a natural loner, and their individual backgrounds, and in some cases the nature of their sexuality, are only hinted at. They live in a sort of emotional and social blur..."

Another aspect of the film which was widely appreciated was the quality of the acting: "These consummate stage and film actors are one of the main reasons Resnais' work combines so effortlessly the cinematic with the theatrical."

Awards and nominations

Alain Resnais won a Silver Lion award for best direction at the 2006 Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

, as well as the 2007 Étoile d'Or for best director and a FIPRESCI
FIPRESCI
The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in...

 Prize at the 2007 European Film Awards. The film received seven nominations for the 2007 Césars
César Award
The César Award is the national film award of France, first given out in 1975. The nominations are selected by the members of the Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma....

 but did not win any of the categories. Laura Morante won a Pasinetti Award for best actress at the 2006 Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

.
  • César Awards (France)
    • Nominated: Best Cinematography (Eric Gautier)
    • Nominated: Best Costume Design (Jackie Budin)
    • Nominated: Best Director (Alain Resnais)
    • Nominated: Best Editing (Hervé de Luze
    • Nominated: Best Music Written for a Film (Mark Snow)
    • Nominated: Best Production Design (Jacques Saulnier)
    • Nominated: Best Sound (Jean-Marie Blondel, Thomas Desjonquères and Gérard Lamps)
    • Nominated: Best Writing - Adaptation (Jean-Michel Ribes)

  • Venice Film Festival
    Venice Film Festival
    The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

    (Italy)
    • Won: Pasinetti Award for Best Actress (Laura Morante
    • Won: Silver Lion for Best Director (Alain Resnais)
    • Nominated: Golden Lion
      Golden Lion
      Il Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...

      (Alain Resnais)

External links

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