Isild le Besco On Directing 'Charly'

At the start of our interview, twenty-five year old French filmmaker Isild le Besco handed me a beautiful booklet about her new film Charly.

An unusual and arresting coming of age story, Charly just made its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca film festival; it's Le Besco's second feature film. While primarily known as an actress (A Tout De Suite, The Untouchable), Le Besco also wrote and directed Demi-tarif when she was only nineteen.

"I made this," Le Besco said as I studied her offering. The film's poster features a drawing (by Le Besco) showing what looks like a woman's backside with a man's genitals superimposed. The black and white sketch, set in front of a red background, alludes to a climactic scene in the film.

"I always wanted to do my own thing," Le Besco said. "Even when I was young, I used to draw a lot, it was very important to me."

This need to create explains Le Besco's confident move from acting to directing. Le Besco wrote Charly for her younger brother, Kolia Litscher, who stars as Nicholas, an unhappy, semi-illiterate fourteen-year-old who leaves his small, impoverished life in search of the sea and, of course, himself. On his journey, he meets Charly (Julie-Marie Parmentier), an intense young prostitute who lives in a trailer.

In a wonderful scene set in Charly's trailer during breakfast, they act out a passage from Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening, not coincidentally the story of a young man's coming of age. When a beating is required, Nicholas hits Charly on the leg with a spoon. She fakes screaming. He fakes crying.

"This was not improvised," Le Besco confirmed. "It was written like that."

The absurd, stilted dialogue between the characters is often halting and frequently funny. Unsure of himself, Nicholas answers Charly's relentless questioning with muttered "dunnos." In return, Charly demands: "Understand? Do you understand?"

Charly is played by Parmentier, an actress Le Besco first met working together as teenagers on Emmanuelle Bercot's Le Choix d'Elodie. Charly is a memorable character, and Le Besco admits she would have been tempted to play the role -- had she not already cast her brother in the lead.

A seemingly simple story, Charly is nonetheless a complex, ambitious film, featuring long stretches without dialogue, a notable absence of music, and intermittent, unexpected images of underwater sea life -- sharks and walrus and jelly fish -- that reflect the subconscious workings of Nicholas' troubled mind.

"My first step writing," Le Besco said, "was the idea of going to the snow and having sex with a girl. It changed later to the sea. But that was the most important thing, the loneliness of being young and alone."

Fortunately for fans of her acting (myself included), the unstoppable Le Besco will continue to appear on both sides of the camera. After Tribeca, she was hopping a plane to Iceland for a role in The Good Heart, a new film by Dabur Kari (Nói albínói) co-starring Paul Dano and Brian Cox. In September, Le Besco will go on to direct her third film, the story of three women who accidentally kill someone. The project takes the jump from adolescence into the world of adults, but the characters, Le Besco assured me, remain outsiders.

Posted: May 4, 2008