Did you have fun in the shoes of this daronne?
Oh yes. Because there was so much to do. It was very varied. In an original device.
Do you understand your character of Patience?
In any case, I do everything to make it understood. Including so that we find it amoral, transgressing the prohibition but, at the same time, with generosity and awareness of others. At first, she had no idea of making money. She’s not a predator. What she wants is to save someone and that will rather reward her because, as she is clever, she sees what it will bring her.
It still has a special relationship with legality …
As dogs do not make cats, the weight of her past and a certain family determinism mean that she is not afraid to embark on this adventure. She only reproduces a pattern by becoming, finally, the daughter of her parents. From a narrative point of view, she also finds the symbolic places and situations of childhood with the disguise, the cellar, the hiding place, the secret… It was already very well described in the book.
Did you read the book before you got the script for the film?
It’s a very good book, well written, fun and daring. What’s funny is the contrast between who she is and the people she faces.
A character propelled into an environment that is not his …
This strangeness, we feel it from the beginning of the film. She is not quite at ease in any environment. She also has a form of loneliness from a character who, in fact, dreams of changing her life.
Was it complicated to work with the Arabic language?
It wasn’t that easy. I didn’t speak it at all. And I still don’t speak it. I worked a lot with a teacher. I rehearsed on tapes. I learned all the texts by heart.
It’s been a while since you last played a comedy?
Yes. But I did more than I am granted. I like the rhythm of the comedy, the speed, the liveliness in the game.
Are you worried about the cinema today?
It’s still a bit early to tell. Me, I continue to go there a lot. This is the first thing to do. But there are still fears. It’s normal, it was a big trauma. Now we have to find the right balance between fear and vigilance.
A comedy between farce and thriller
Patience Portefeux (Isabelle Huppert) works for the police but remains a little foreign to this world. We can see it from the first scene where, embarked on a police raid for her talents as an interpreter in Arabic, she struggles to put on her bulletproof vest correctly.
She is a court interpreter specializing in translations of wiretaps for the narcotics squad. But, in the end, this work is an activity like any other for this woman, a widow, mother of two grown daughters. Especially since Patience, anar of the left, has a tenuous relationship to legality.
But, as she is a woman full of paradoxes, that does not prevent her love of the moment from being the boss of the narcotics squad. And, above all, it doesn’t bother her either to take advantage of a chance to collect a large quantity of hash and to embark on the wholesale deal.
Fashionable a ?Breaking Bad or from the series ?Hard, the first comic spring comes from the plunge of a Boeotian in an unknown and coded world. But, above all, Isabelle Huppert, very in shape, gives a particular salt to this Patience, almost banal woman soon attifed like an Arab bourgeois holding the dragee high to the small dealers of Paris.
There is also the pleasure of meeting Hippolyte Girardot and the tasty Liliane Rovère (?Ten percent). Without forgetting that in this adaptation of the novel of the same name by Hannelore Cayre, the director Jean-Paul Salomé (Women in the shadows) does not revolutionize the way of filming but holds its thread perfectly between farce and thriller.
This pleasant comedy can be watched without qualms. Just for the pleasure of a moment of relaxation in the name of laughter. ?1 h 46.
– .
