Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet was inspired to write her directorial debut, Anaïs in Love, based on an affair she had with a married man.
“It’s sort of a self fiction, as you would say in French, of sorts because a few years ago, I myself, met and had a story with a man who was married,” Bourgeois-Tacquet told MovieMaker. “He would talk to me about his wife in ways that made me very curious of her, and I felt that she and I had reasons to meet. And from this space of curiosity, I began writing the story of this love triangle in which the man is eventually sidelined in the narrative as the two women that surround him meet.”
Anaïs in Love follows Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier), a 30-year-old woman who falls out of love with her current boyfriend and decides to have an affair with a married man named Daniel (Denis Podalydès). But when she reads a book written by Daniel’s wife, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), she begins to fall in love with her, too.
For Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, writing about her own experiences is the only way to write.
“For the moment. I have only ever written on things that sort of are nourished by myself, my personality, my obsessions,” she said. “I can’t work outside of a certain regime of vibrancy which for me is only tied to what I might call the regime of truth. So for the moment, I haven’t ever been able to write something outside of my own experience.”
Though the film technically contains two sex scenes, Bourgeois-Tacquet only considers the one between Anaïs (Demoustier) and Emilie (Tedeschi) to be a true sex scene. Bourgeois-Tacquet said that the other, between Anaïs and Emilie’s husband, Daniel (Podalydès) doesn’t really count because the film’s true love affair is between Anaïs and Emilie.
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“The first with Daniel, which is kind of a descriptive large-angle scene.. for me, it doesn’t really count as one because the was only so much written to get a comedic effect and it was so clear that nothing was really going to come potentially from that scene, but I don’t really think about it in those terms. So for me, somehow, the scene for the two women on the beach is the main sex scene to be discussed,” she said.
Though at one time Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet considered not having a love scene between Emilie and Anais at all, or to have it only at the end of the film, she ultimately decided it was necessary to the plot of the film.
“It was the first time that I shot a scene of love and sex and so that also took some work because I was very specific and in knowing what part of the sensuality I was trying to capture and sort of how to work that with the actresses and with the camera so as to get the intended results,” she said.
“The question of whether or not it needed to be seen on something and even not just whether we needed to see them sleep together or whether their love needed to be consumed at all is something that I was toying with quite a bit.
“For a while I imagined that perhaps the film could end with a scene of love between them after Emilie said that, you know, they need to stop things and Anais overcome her resistance and say no, and then perhaps then there could have been a moment of eroticism and love together — that was one idea. Then in the writing… moved up in the script, it became apparent to me that that it was absolutely necessary to do justice to the detonation of desire that I was staging, that this eruption of this desire that comes and throws itself in the middle of these two women’s lives — the only way to do justice to it was to have the scene exist and to have it exists earlier rather than later.”
Anaïs in Love hits theaters Friday, April 29 and VOD on May 6.
Main Image: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Anaïs Demoustier in Anaïs in Love directed by, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
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