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4th Sep 2019
Miu Miu’s influential short-film series Women’s Tales reads as a who’s who of 21st century filmmaking talent, with Ava DuVernay, Agnès Varda and Miranda July among the directorial names who have created works for the house.
For its 18th episode, the Bafta Award-winning Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2011, and You Were Never Really Here, 2017) has created Brigitte, a documentary which investigates the intimate relationships between sisters, as seen through her subject, the fiercely private French portrait photographer Brigitte Lacombe (Lacombe’s own list of subjects includes Barack Obama, Meryl Streep and Louise Bourgeois). The twist? The director and her protagonist come under the scrutiny of the camera’s lens, transforming the film into a disarmingly honest exploration of the sacrifices we make on the path to success.
Here, both women talk to Vogue at the Venice Film Festival about art of honest filmmaking.
Ramsay and Lacombe in a promotional portrait for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales. Image credit: Brigitte Lacombe
Brigitte is an unapologetically intimate project that shows you both – two self-confessed “obsessives” – at work. How did you first meet?
Brigitte Lacombe (BL): “I was working on a project about filmmakers for the National Museum of Qatar for the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, in 2011, and I really wanted to include Lynne, so I asked to take her portrait.”
Lynne Ramsay (LR): “I used to study photography before I was a filmmaker, so I’m obsessed with photographers and was fascinated by Brigitte’s methods. You can always tell a great photographer because they make you feel super-relaxed. That doesn’t happen very often and I felt that she captured something really genuine [during that first portrait shoot]. That was the beginning of our relationship.”
The film begins with a recorded conversation between you both at Brigitte’s family home in Le Cannet, Cannes. Why was that moment so important?
BL: “Supposedly Lynne just came for lunch at my family house, a place we’ve had for seven generations. Lynne’s sound designer had given her a recording device that we put on the table and completely forgot about. It was just us eating lunch, no cameras. But it became a conversation about the two of us, and then my sister Marian. That’s when we realised that [the film] would be about family relationships and families that you choose. We decided to keep it about people we truly care about, that mean something in our life. The heart of the film was this conversation.”
LR: “It was so spontaneous and candid. When my dialogue editor heard it they said, ‘This is fascinating’, and that I should make it the body of [the film]. It was very casual, a family kind of thing. After that, I decided to set up a photo shoot that Brigitte wouldn’t be aware of because she’d be in her natural habitat, where I could observe her at work.”
“I’ve never done anything like this before, but that’s kind of exciting,” Lynne says at the start of the film. The film uses the concept of a photo shoot to turn the camera on you both. How did it feel to be looked at in this way?
LR: “It’s quite an exposing thing for both of us. I did everything to cut myself out, which is the instinct of a filmmaker. But every time I did that it lost power. It’s a documentary of women at work and there was a delicacy and a fairness in us watching eachother. I wanted the viewer to be curious about these women, the sacrifices made and how our work is our whole lives.”
BL: “I consider [the film] a turning point in my life. I would not have said yes to anyone else, I admire Lynne for her work, and as a person I know and love. I was able to completely let go because I knew she understands what I do. [To Lynne] I felt that you were giving me an assignment. I never felt the presence of the camera, except in a comforting way. The one thing I said to Lynne was, ‘you have to let me turn the camera on you’. When Lynne was also open to me, it allowed me to look at myself. When you do what we do, you don’t look at yourself.”
The exploration into the relationship between sisters is central to the film, why?
BL: “My sister, Marian, and I are an extension of each other – she is part of me. She is a documentary filmmaker and we work on many projects together. I thought it was so extraordinary of Lynne to be so aware of my relationship with my sister and decide to make it a very central part of the story. I’m really grateful for that, because how many times do you have the chance to have that kind of celebration of one thing you really care about?”
LR: “I have two sisters. There is a kind of distance between us and I think this is a love song to her in a way. This film is me also saying I’d love to connect again. As Brigitte says in the movie, ‘You’ll find her again’. I hope I do and I feel confident I will.”
One of the female figures examined in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales. Image credit: Brigitte Lacombe
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Brigitte describes the role fashion plays in her life as providing a liberating uniform. Wearing the same thing every day, she says, means: “You don’t have to bother about pleasing people. You are as you are, and they are going to take you as you are no matter what.” Where did this idea come from?
BL: “It started many years ago when Issey Miyake started his line Pleats Please, I guess around 25 years ago [first, as part of the Issey Miyake line in 1988, and as its own brand from SS94]. He gave me a skirt and a shirt and a little bag – everything you can see [that I’m still wearing] today. Very quickly, that became all I would wear.”
LR: “There’s such a power in that.”
What were your feelings towards the ‘female gaze’ when you were starting out?
BL: “My mentor was painter and photographer Jeannette Leroy. I became her assistant when I was 18. It was important to me that she was a woman and she was a very big inspiration. In my work, I feel for sure that I look differently at a woman than a man does, because there is not the same seduction involved. When you remove the idea of real seduction, there is a different sense of trust and vulnerability.”
LR: “When I started off, I didn’t think about gender. I loved cameras and I loved Diane Arbus’s work, but it comes into the frame more now. I was super determined to always only think about the work. One thing I love about Brigitte is that she never ever thinks of me in terms of a ‘woman filmmaker’. We never think of [what we do] in terms of gender.”