Angelica Ruffier is bringing La belle année, which translates to “The Beautiful Year,” to Rotterdam. In her debut feature film, she makes herself vulnerable, diving into her own past and desire, her family, her teenage crush on her teacher Sylvie Bresson, and such themes as loss, memory, and longing. The essayistic documentary is infused with clips from 1970s cinema.
The hybrid film, which world premieres in the Tiger Competition lineup of the 55th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Feb. 1.
The IFFR website promises “a finely woven, reflective essay on past longings and present selves infused with the subtle glamor of French cinema.” And it adds: “La belle année becomes a meditation on far more than one person’s past, present and imagined future. Its emotional terrain is one in which many viewers may recognise themselves.”
Stockholm, Sweden-based Ruffier, who previously directed short films From Here to There and the Other Way Around (2018) and Stranger (2020), wrote and directed the film, for which Odd Slice Films is handling sales, except for Sweden, where Folkets Bio will release it theatrically on April 17.
Produced by Marta Dauliute and Brynhildur Þórarinsdóttir, La belle année features cinematography courtesy of Simon Averin Markström, while Anna Eborn handled editing.
In a Zoom interview, Ruffier talked to THR about her cinematic and personal journey with La belle année, balancing scripted and improvised scenes, meeting her former teacher crush for the film, and why her editor played a particularly big role in shaping the movie.
The filmmaker started her five-year-long work on the movie during her time in film school. Showing her personal side may be a big challenge for many of us, but Ruffier didn’t struggle with it too much. “Strangely enough, it was not that difficult in a way, because with film, you still have some sort of control of what is said and shown,” she tells THR. “But this filmic space allowed me to step out and find a form of storytelling. We definitely had difficult moments, but having a filmmaking team is also kind of a family. It’s another kind of family that you have beside you.”
La belle année is a mix of scenes scripted by Ruffier, illustrated with images captured for the film or classic film clips, as well as scenes showing her talking to her family, her former teacher and others. “All the scenes where I’m interacting with another person are not scripted,” she says. “I entered those scenes with a desire or goal and then just let things happen. The scripted, much more constructed scenes are cinematically inspired by the Dardenne brothers, how the camera follows you, and how you can create cinematic intensity.”
Ruffier’s idea to use classic film clips came very early in the creative process. “That was actually one of the first things I had in mind – [French director] Claude Lelouch and [Belgian director Harry Kümel’s 1971 erotic horror film] Daughters of Darkness],” she tells THR. “I wanted to show how love, how a fascination for someone carries in itself a lot of other words, literature and cinema, and how you are infused by this when you feel things.” The feeling in her case was simple, yet challenging. “It’s a kind of forbidden love, something transgressing, by a teenager,” she explains.
Given that La belle année isn’t easily put into a genre drawer, how would the filmmaker herself describe her film? “It’s about a young woman who loses her father and is exposed to feelings that she can’t recognize, and she then identifies with her 16-year-old self who wrote diaries about feelings that she couldn’t embody,” Ruffier replies. “When you ask about big themes, it’s about memory, not feeling alone, having families [or influences] other than the one you have naturally. But it’s also about what to do about past loves. Should you do something?”
There is a certain nostalgia to La belle année, and the filmmaker knows another reason for that, beyond the themes of longing and memory. “The film goes back to a time before the internet. You know, we wrote letters to each other back then,” says Ruffier. “So, yes, there is a romantic view.”
For Ruffier, the hardest part was filming scenes that show her unearthing and reading her old school-time diaries, full of entries about her then-teacher. “To be able to read them, and not censor them out of shame, was most difficult,” she shares.
What was it like to meet her old teacher again after many, many years, especially given that the filmmaker used to have a teenage crush on her? Ruffier was impressed by Bresson’s composure and willingness to engage. “I am very amazed by her cinematic coolness,” she tells THR. “I come there with difficult questions and a great deal of desire to talk and eat, and she accepts that and the camera. So that was brilliant of her.”
The editing was “very important” for the movie, Ruffier highlights, lauding Eborn, a colleague from film school, as a particularly important collaborator given that she could bring more of an outsider’s view. “When you make a movie where you yourself are the hero, you need someone that you can have a big dialogue with about what the film actually needs.”
While Ruffier has built her filmmaking skills, she shares with THR that reading her old diary entries for La belle année made her think about her skill in expressing emotions. “I want to be like you. No, I want to be you,” she reads an old entry about her teacher in the film, for example.
“That’s what I actually wrote in this diary when I was 16,” Ruffier emphasizes. “It’s what I felt at that moment. And I think I was much better at writing as a 16-year-old than I am now. I was sometimes much more in contact with my feelings.”
The filmmaker concludes by sharing that she has some ideas for future films, but nothing to share yet. Any topics that Ruffier wants to explore next? “I mostly have a desire to work with some people I have worked with on this movie,” she tells THR. “I really want to continue that collaboration.”
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