– CANNES 2026: The filmmaker shares the genesis of her adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier’s novel and explains her approach towards fear and violence which blends drama and thriller codes
(© Paul Guilhaume)
Unveiled in competition in the 79th Cannes Film Festival, The Birthday Party is the 3rd feature film by French director Léa Mysius, who was unearthed in Critics’ Week 2017 via Ava and selected in the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight with The Five Devils.
Cineuropa: What made you want to adapt Laurent Mauvignier’s novel?
Léa Mysius: It was the producer of my previous films who gave me the idea. I was familiar with Laurent Mauvignier’s books, but the idea of adapting one had never crossed my mind. At the time, I was looking for a film subject and exploring different ideas, and I kept coming back to the theme of the night. I’d actually bought The Birthday Party at the same time as The Farmer’s Daughter by Jim Harrison. And that’s when my producer, Jean-Louis Livi, said to me: ‘I’ve got a book I want to propose to you, The Birthday Party. I read it straight away, in two days, and I loved it. I was totally sucked in, and I immediately accepted his proposal to adapt it.
What were the main decisions you made when writing the screenplay?
I decided from the outset not to include flashbacks, which there are a lot of in the book. I picked out what interested me the most and I wrote a first chronological version really quickly. It wasn’t easy because the characters are fuelled by flashbacks, and Laurent’s writing, which goes into a lot of detail. That’s actually what’s interesting about the book, because when you look at the bare bones of the story there’s not that much to it, it could be the story of any old American film. So we had to reproduce in the film what was interesting in the book. What I loved straight away was the fact that it created the possibility for an A History of Violence-style genre film while being firmly anchored in France with real people. It could just as easily be a simple news story, but when we got into the lives of each of the characters, we understood them: they’re not baddies and there’s nothing Manichean about them. So we had an opportunity to make a drama and a thriller combined.
How did you manage the film’s suspense, the very short duration of the story, the tension, and drip-feeding micro-elements?
There are lots of little details. Laurent is really skilled when it comes to suspense, he manages to write ten pages with nothing really happening, but he includes just enough beforehand to be able to go off on a tangent that works. I tried to keep that in the screenplay, to fill it with enough ammunition early on to get away with nothing seeming to happen for a few scenes. We had to drip-feed information, just like at the beginning, for example, when little Ida says in a dialogue which isn’t in the book, that she would have preferred to have been an orphan like her mother, so that the viewer is aware that Thomas and Ida don’t know Nora does actually have parents. All of that happens either through short dialogue or through situations which help us understand things about the characters, without having them explained to us.
The overall atmosphere in the film is crepuscular.
It’s set in a forgotten part of the countryside, with farmers in difficulty, people who are struggling and who aren’t happy with their lives, despite the fact they’re doing what they can. There’s a sense of affection between Nora and Thomas, but they’re not hugely happy in this life which they never actually chose for themselves. But we only realise that later on. Life has imposed certain choices on them, which have led them where they are. All the characters who live there are flawed and wounded. But maybe, over the course of the night, they’ll be able to take back control over their lives, as a result of this imprisonment.
How did you want to depict these three “bad guys“ who make an appearance?
I wanted them to form a brotherhood, for them to have really a brotherly relationship. They’re like a trinity. There’s the big brother, the charismatic boss, but he’s done time in prison. So the middle brother finds himself in charge of everything, while the little on, who’s a bit naïve and detached, is used by his older brothers. These days, we’d call them power relations. I also wanted Benoît Magimel’s character, who’s a baddie, to be really kind and normal when he turns up in his ill-fitting suit, and for this normal and overly kind side of his to be what’s really frightening.
How did you look to tackle the violence inherent to the film’s subject-matter?
I didn’t want it to be voyeuristic or to make the audience uncomfortable. When we think of imprisonment, we think of Funny Games by Michael Haneke, a film which makes me a bit uncomfortable because I know they’re going to be tortured throughout the film and I’m going to have to stomach that torture. I didn’t want my film to be like that at all. Obviously, it is a little terrifying, because the three brothers are there and we don’t know what they’re going to do, but I wanted the audience to understand all the characters, including the baddies, and for them to hold onto their hope in humanity. I didn’t want to make a popular film either, a pure thriller or a film with blood spurting everywhere, fun-style. I wanted it to be realistic but also a little poetic, to make it more bearable, and for the film world to explore reality and confront us with violent things without making us feel raw violence.
All the characters have a double nature.
That was really important. It was already the case in the book, but I accentuated it. I wanted viewers to be able to say, at the end of the film, that we never really know the people we live with. Everyone has a dark side, a light side, etc. That’s just the complex nature of human beings: no-one one’s entirely moral, everyone has a monster inside of them. We see it in the world today, what people are capable of. It’s something we think about, worry about and which deserve to be explored. And I was also interested in the fact that women, who we tend to see as pure, also have a darker and amoral side, that their morality might also be called into question.
What were your mise en scene intentions for this huis clos set in two practically adjacent buildings?
I really liked that they were face to face, because it would turn the huis clos aspect into a snapshot of society – social domination, money, class, etc. and the tensions they bring, because Cristina’s character is a wealthy artist. My set designer and I created an architect-style house to really bring that confrontation to life. Opposite, there’s the farm where they have slightly less money, where they’re struggling a little bit more, and you can see it in the space. What also interested me in the book was that there were two cases of imprisonment unfolding in parallel, ultimately almost two stories which end up echoing one another. I really liked the idea of people looking at each other, between one house and another, and that, little by little, amidst all the fear, we enter into spaces which end up merging together. That’s why there’s that liminal passage through which Bègue’s character joins the two houses together, almost mentally. When we’re really stressed, we can experience derealisation. Little by little, anxiety blurs space and time so that the audience feels a little bit lost in the cinema.
(Translated from French)
