THEspiped to a true story, The story of Patrice and Michel (in the room on March 6) describes the love that unites two brothers (Frèresbrothers, is the original title) who, in the summer of 1948, abandoned by the mother at 5 and 7 years old, spent, only, seven years in absolute freedom in the woods not far from the summer colony from where they had fled, convinced as they were that a terrible crime had been committed because of them.
Terrified of the idea of being arrested by the police, the children remain hidden. Collection, hunting, fishing, construction of shelters … they become experts in the art of survival by sharing hunger, cold, but also moments of pure joy, in symbiosis with nature. But one day, during a very rigid winter, Patrice leaves the camp to go looking for something to cure Michel, suffering, and disappears for several days … The film begins, many years later, when Michel decides to leave his wife, children and a well -organized life for the great Canadian North going in search of his brother, who disappeared.
Articulated on two temporal axes, Olivier Cases’s film moves between the lost time of that exceptional childhood and today, with the past to illuminate the present. The two “wild boys” remember Victor, the protagonist of The wild guy by François Truffaut (1970): «We started from the end. We started from the best »he will say Patrice to his brother who reached her in the icy vastness of Canadian North. And also: “Because you live, I have to leave.” How do you live after having had such an extreme and shared experience? And it can be continued without the other e give up a terrible lost paradise, a life full of pitfalls, but bright and free, in contact with nature? “I chase something that will not return,” Patrice will admit, suicide at 48 years old in 1993.
Patrice and Michel, wild boys.
Olivier Cases, the project of this film began in a very personal way in a bistrot.
With Michel we have known each other for twenty years, we were in a coffee in Paris with a band of friends. You saw each other almost every day, in the morning, before starting the day, sharing small things and chatter. For me Michel was the architect, in a group of friends where there is a lawyer, a tapestry, a plumber, other architects. Michel is Michel Paul De Robert de Lafregeyre, a very elegant man who lives in the 17th arrondissement, a very chic area. In 2015 the lawyer of this group of friends buys a house in the south of France, Michel deva restored it. It passes a lot of time. I often reach my wife and my children on the weekend. On a Saturday afternoon, at the edge of the swimming pool, I see him while carving a piece of wood as he would make an Indian Cheeroke, but with his Cartier clock on his wrist. So I asked him: “Michel is there something about your life that you didn’t tell me?” He smiles and says to me: “You know, I had a somewhat particular childhood.” And he revealed his secret to me.
A secret that had remedied for a long time. Not even his family had known anything, until Patrice’s death. His real intuition, understand that there was something behind that simple gesture.
I think I am trained to interpret the gestures and has to build stories starting from small details. And when Michel told me about his incredible story, what struck me most was the boundless love he felt for his brother. My son had just been born, I had discovered what it means to love someone more than themselves, the intensity of an emotion that I didn’t believe in until then. Yet the love of which Michel spoke to me was even more absolute, more infinite, than what you can feel for a child.
Mathieu Kassovitz is Patrice.
The mystery of fraternal love is still inavased. There have been studies regarding brothers in the radicalization process (the Abdeslam brothers, for example, for the 2015 attacks in Paris). Did the movie discovered something he didn’t know?
I was struck by that you can be in symbiosis – Patrice and Michel are more than twins, theirs was an absolute bond – but each have their own karma, their destiny. Patrice is not much older than Michel, but it is he who decides to save his brother, he who believes he has killed a man who actually committed suicide in the summer colony and for this reason he escapes, deprives herself of food to feed her brother. He who walks away in search of help leaving his brother only in the woods for three days. And Michel will never know what happened to him. But for sure it was something that changed it.
Research on the truthfulness of history
She kept the mystery about that episode in the film.
In the last period of Patrice’s life, Michel interrogated him again, but he didn’t answer: “I protected you when you were a child, I continue to do so now”.
But did you get an idea?
A child with that experience, with a similar resistance, if he returns without evident signs on the body … I believe that the most concrete hypothesis that can be made is that it was sexual violence. Michel also agrees. But we will never know. Michel wanted to have children and it was not easy for him, but after a few years he was able to achieve this desire. Patrice has never had children, too many privations had been in childhood: it was sterile. Michel is convinced that if his brother had a descendants and the responsibility of a son, things would have gone differently for him.
Have you never doubted what Michel told her?
I asked myself the question at the beginning, but there is an important element: Michel never looked for me, it is I who did it. It would have been conveniently for him to remain in his comfortable life without revealing anything to anyone. I discussed with him for 5 years before writing a single script line. It was a therapeutic work for him. And for me too. I warned him that such a story would arouse doubts about his truthfulness and then I convinced him to go looking for tests on site. In France, when something works, you immediately seek the breaking point: there was a journalist who tried to do research, to demonstrate the impossibility of Michel’s story, but he found nothing. What was magical, however, is that 70 years later we do us research, we brought back to the surfaces of which the locals had even knowing. We met a gentleman, who died this year, who was a child with Patrice and Michel in the Colonia Holidays. When I told Michel that I found Non Jackie he had told me about, but his brother, and that I had talked to him, decided to call him together. After a brief silence, this gentleman said: “Mic, but where you were the whole time? I still have goosebumps. At the finished film we decided to make a screening also in his city and we invited him: they hugged themselves as if they were still two children who had never separated.
François Truffaut and his wild boyfriend
The wild guy Was it an inspiration of Truffaut?
The film is difficult to find, it is not on DVD, it is present only in the Cineteche. I’ve never seen him, not even as a boy. What really inspired me were western films, which I devoured as a child. For me, the film is the love combat of two brothers who separates death. Even the idea of lost paradise, of the large spaces, the landscape comes from American cinema. The Lord of the flies, Into the Wild They were films that marked me. My child’s dream is to make a real western with real cowboy, I wanted to tell this.
Mathieu Kassovitz and Yvan Attal.
Does the casting alone half the success of the film, as Yvan Attal and Mathieu Kassovitz convinced to play Michel and Patrice adults?
With Yvan it was easy, Mathieu instead refused the first time. The agent said: “He doesn’t have time.” But I didn’t want to give up. Patrice is part of my life even if I have never known him. And there are few actors in France that have that melancholy, that flame that burns fast that I see in Mathieu. Mathieu for me was an obligatory choice, the only one. I called him, a ridiculous phone call, Mathieu doesn’t speak much, I found myself making a monologue. I told him: “Thanks to having read the script, I wanted to tell you that I am sorry that you will not make the film, but I realize that this phone call does not make sense.” He let me speak then when I was about to put down, I said to him: “I didn’t know Patrice, but it’s as if I had done it, I can’t give his role to another”. Then he asks me: “Wait, but is it a true story?” The moment he understood it accepted.
Where does the seduction of the “true story” that works for actors come from, but also a lot on spectators?
Claude Lelouch says that the greatest screenwriter is life: the sublime we find in life is unreachable, there is no narrative that holds. First of all because when we tell we censor: “It is too sad, too melodramatic …”.
The atrocious choice of the mother
In the story, the mother makes an atrocious choice, but the film does not seem to judge her.
The mother had a very precise idea of herself. Michel discovered after his death he had a half -sister, he discovered him from the notary, it is she who inherited everything. Born before them, she was abandoned like them during the war. And saved in extremis from the neighbors. The mother, a woman from the 1940s, was an intellectual, very beautiful, loved men and consumed them as men did with women at that time. He did not want to be a mother in an era in which the interruption of pregnancy did not exist. He had already aborted several times. Michel told me he asked her: “But why did you do this?” And she placed: “Simply because I never wanted to you.” And not to judge her, I looked further: I thought about the feminist movement that arrived later, in the 1960s. And I thought that she had been, with her choices, a militant early.
One thing that the film tells us is that the word free and the secret poisons: did the film represent a further step in the healing path for Michel?
The film has certainly represented another stage of the process. “I was your psychologist for 5 years,” I told him. And he also allowed him to make a tribute to his brother, he gave him a form of eternity. There were times when he said to me: “I would like to stop.” He did not do it because he saw my desire to tell. And for Patrice. But I also believe for himself, without knowing it. All the affection we have met on tour with the film, all the people who wrote to say to say: “My story is similar to yours”, I think they convinced it they did the right thing. And to have a new life after this chapter.
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