Audrey Diwan dissociates herself from Bac Nord: “I didn’t want to write this film”
In a fascinating interview, the director and screenwriter returns to the controversy generated by the film she co-wrote with Cédric Jimenez.
The total absence of tongue-in-cheek in interviews is rare and precious. Audrey Diwan, prolific screenwriter (L’Amour ouf, La French, Ami-ami, Love and the forests, Bac Nord, Barbès Little Algeria…) and director since 2019 (But you are crazy, The Event and lately Emmanuelle) spoke at length with the cinema magazine Tsounami. A truly fascinating discussion, where Diwan notably discusses the status of the screenwriter and the differences between the script and the film shot. And to admit that regarding North Bac by Cédric Jimenez, “the shift in meaning“between what she had proposed and the final result put her”angry“.
“I didn’t want to write this movie, I wasn’t supposed to in the first place“, she continues. “Cédric had to write it alone while I worked on The Event. At the time, we were together. We had a small house, a former fisherman’s hut in the heights of Marseille. At the end of the summer, he told me that he didn’t really like the film and that it would be better if I accompanied him. We had a big discussion about what the police represent in our society. I tell him I’m not comfortable with the subject.
We talk for a long time, I think, I also read, notably The monster factory by Cédric Pujol, and I said to him: ”Listen, what could be interesting is to try to understand how those we designate as the best cops in France became anti-police.’ (…) And Cédric accepts this direction. We wrote the film together, it went very badly because as a couple, we no longer agreed on much and we separated during the writing. I’m finishing the first version, I think I’m still being asked to move on to the next version, but we’re in the middle of a separation. It’s hell.“
Cédric Jimenez is outraged by “pure political recovery” around Bac Nord
Audrey Diwan specifies that she and Jimenez did not arrive “more to work together“. She therefore leaves the project leaving “a fairly precise road map”which will be followed by other versions, written without it and concentrated “on a form of efficiency, of logic of action. And for me, the textbook case is the scene that is targeted by the AFP journalist at the Cannes Film Festival.“
Those who follow cinema news have inevitably heard about it: during the film’s press conference on the Croisette, an Irish journalist, Fiachra Gibbons, put his feet in the dish and launched the controversy over North Bac : “The film is great, but there is a problem there. We are in an election year. And I was embarrassed. Really embarrassed. And I wasn’t the only one“, he assured.
He was outraged that the inhabitants of the cities were represented as “beasts (…) It’s a vision that we always have in the French media: the zones where we cannot pass, the zones outside civilization, the zones where French law must be reimposed (…) We are in an election year. I saw this with the eye of an outsider and I said to myself: maybe I will vote for Le Pen after that.“
In the interview given to TsounamiAudrey Diwan contextualizes: “The controversy started from this scene where we see a kid break a car, be taken away by the cops and thrown into a police vehicle. He insults the cops, then one of them turns on the radio and they end up singing together. The journalist criticizes the director (…), rightly, for a terrible amalgamation between drug traffickers and residents of the cities. In the version I wrote, I was inspired by the anecdote of a woman who lived in one of these cities. She told us: ‘You know, we at BAC Nord, sometimes we called him to babysit, because when our kids fall into the hands of the chouf, the narcos, we can’t go get them, we can’t get them back. ‘.
So the BAC North team was tasked with recovering a young boy who was hanging out in a multipurpose room, with narcotics indeed, but this kid was just playing table football! So the BAC team shows up, catches him even though he hasn’t done anything wrong at that precise moment, takes him away. And that’s why he insults them in the car! (…) In the final version, the children of the city are portrayed as delinquents. But obviously, we should have given time to this story, telling the mother, then the hunt, the table football, the child’s reaction… Here for me, the rewriting yields to the shortcut and the logic of the action, to the detriment of meaning…“
Audrey Diwan also gives the example of a scene where the police officer played by Karim Leklou takes refuge in an apartment, and where the film suggests that the inhabitants of the place, a mother and her son, are on the side of the drug traffickers. While Diwan assures that in his scenario, the mother and son are on the contrary afraid that the drug traffickers will believe that they are collaborating with the police. “It makes me sick”she explains. “In full promotion of The EventI have been told a lot about North Bac. I didn’t want to say anything. Now time has passed, so I feel I have the right to speak this truth. At the time, I would not have dared to say, rightly or wrongly: ‘But I totally disagree!‘”
The entirety of this long interview, which covers numerous subjects, can be found on the website of Tsounami.
