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The main thread of 'La Tourneuse de Pages' is a story of revenge, but behind it is a growing
element of something more ambiguous, where fascination and attraction merge into manipulation.
The film is about class revenge and its psychological translation, but since music-making is pri-
marily a physical act, I felt that this revenge also had to be physical, provoking fear and tension
as the story unfolds.
It was doubtless the need to keep a safe distance from my own experiences as a musician and
my own view of music-making that prompted me to explore the field of the suspense drama, but
I was surprised to discover how similar the mechanisms of suspense are to the techniques of
writing music: they both include the same ideas of tension/relaxation, slowing down and speed-
ing up, cadences, variations in tempo, pauses, climaxes, etc.
The page turner’s role is one of self-effacement: she comes on stage after the soloists, she re-
mains seated for the applause and does not seem to contribute to their success in any way, and
yet a page turned too early or too late can upset the whole performance. This potential for
danger is even more fascinating because the audience can hardly suspect it.
The gamble of the film lay in the choice of the two lead actresses. They had to express all the
ambiguity that I dreamed of for the film: the constant dialogue between strength and weakness,
between Ariane, the concert pianist prone to stage fright and the fear of failure, and Mélanie, the
girl whose broken dreams now fuel an implacable determination. Before we began filming, I had
visualized using angles and reverse angles to feed the line of tension that I wanted throughout
the film, but the film itself decided otherwise. The very first take made me realize that the
meetings between Catherine Frot and Déborah François should mostly be captured in the same
frame, like a cage in which two wild animals engage in an extraordinary combat.
- Denis Dercourt |
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