Filmmaker Amélie Bonnin hopes her album debut will have a personal imprint.
Auteur, behind this year's Cannes Film Festival opening, has tested the concept of a modern jukebox musical, and her César won the brief short "Bye Bye", but once she starts to expand the work of the premise and search for new tracks - she begins to question the focus of her very much attention.
"I initially chose a male leader, not an intention," Bonning explained. "Once I realized that I wanted to go a different path. I wanted to bring a specific perspective - a forty-year-old woman in her work, motherhood and desire issues. I needed to tell this story through my own lens."
Bonnin reshapes her musical drama around the rising chef played by French pop star Juliette Armanet, who returns to her countryside to face a family health crisis and an unexpected pregnancy – just a few days before opening a restaurant of the same name in Paris.
At the Cannes Film Festival, Bonning himself will be in the spotlight of international attention, an extraordinary coup by a filmmaker who began in a documentary after studying applied art.
“Whether it’s through typography, photography or illustration, I’ve always been attracted to visual storytelling,” she said. “Videos are only later on when they were originally to photograph my own family and capture their stories.”
More than a decade ago, she began a new path. While studying graphic design in Canada, Bonning was immersed in the screening of Raymond DePardon’s small-town document “Modern Life”, just hoping for some familiar attractions. Instead, she found a movie Polaris. She smiled and said, "I cried throughout the movie." Bonning was overwhelmed and missed home, took out her headphones and looked for music to fit her mood. That moment will never disappear, and it directly inspires my own works.
“I love creating a soundtrack for my life,” Bonning said. “We’re all doing it – we played headphones after breakup before a road trip, before a date or alone. (One day away), I wanted to bring that feeling to the screen. Not through big music numbers, but following songs from real life. It’s fun, it’s playful, it’s related to traditional storytelling, but we’re all there because we’re all there.”
To create her National Anthem for "Daily Grinding", Bonning first composed the tone of the chart and the French standards. "The songs that defined my generation," she said. "They have to be identified immediately from the start and most importantly, they have to be songs that the characters know, like a shared memory in their own lives."
Next, her performers will broadcast each tune live, always emphasizing imperfection and spontaneity.
"I can't work abstractly," she explained. "Dubbing is never an option. Every emotion, every turning point must start from now on. Capturing what's really going on before us is more satisfying for the actors and the staff - and knowing that it's real to make the audience stronger for the audience.
"The magic is in the moment when the collective invention is invented - bringing the image to life," Bonning added. "It's about building something together and then watching it unfold in real time."
Bonnin wrote the film for pop singer Juliette Armanet, a popular French Chanteuse who made her debut in Bonnin's previous sentence. This time, the star will never get off the screen while still in the joyful chaos of cherishing imperfect movies.
"Juliette is used to controlling her singing career until Millimeter, singing perfectly," Bonning smiled. "So I kept making her perform differently. She wasn't alone, wearing headphones just thinking about the song - she had to think about her interactions with her partner while skating backwards while countless people were buzzing around. Too much, it was so suitable for our needs."
And, the same approach may continue to work with Bonnin.
"At first, I thought, I've made a movie with songs, so I can't do it again," she said. "But now I think, why not? Music makes me go realistic and get another storytelling. The touch of this fantasy also brings greater emotions."