Tiger competitor Sophie Letourneur portrays the ups and downs of student life for a group of twentysomething Parisians in her freewheeling feature debut, La vie au Ranch. By Edward Lawrenson
When La vie au Ranch screens this Tuesday at IFFR, it won't be the first time its French director, Sophie Letourneur, has seen her film with a paying public. The movie was warmly received at last year's Belfort Film Fesitval, where it won the audience award.
But it will be the first time she's seen it with English subtitles. The subtitling process has proved an especially demanding task. A freewheeling, closely observed comedy-drama about a group of Paris students in their early twenties who congregrate in the apartment (known by all as “the ranch”) shared by the central female leads, Pam and Manon, the movie features much overlapping dialogue between these talkative young men and women. “I had to make choices about what dialogue to subtitle. We can't do it all; there's just too much!”
An additional challenge is the fact that Letourneur's script features a great deal of twenty-something slang of which her translators needed to find English-language approximations. “I'm not nervous,” says Letourneur of the upcoming screening at IFFR, “just curious.”
Although the film plays like a naturalistic slice-of-life, Letourneur was in strong control of the material from development to the final result. It was not improvised. The screenplay grew out of rehearsals by her cast, which Letourneur recorded. She then edited the audio for each sequence – sometimes as much as five hours' worth of material.
“I'd try to have parts of conversation until I had the perfect dialogue, then I'd build it up like a symphony. When I was satisfied with the sound work, I'd make a CD for the actors and they'd have to rehearse to this: there are many sounds mixed together and they have to respect the timing. The sound would work on different layers; they need to know precisely when to make their remarks.”
Letourneur applies a similar level of preparation to her direction of the actors on set. “Everything was planned, even small actions like eating ice cream. It's all orchestrated. Every gesture has been thought about and built up.”
The result is a vivid, precisely detailed portrait of the group dynamic of Ranch regulars that is at once supportive and overbearing for its handful of members. “When you are in your early twenties, you have to leave your parents and be an adult.” The gang of friends that Pam and Manon belong to is a kind of surrogate for the family they have left behind. “You want to stay a little in a warm cocoon,” says Letourneur of the life that revolves around the small flat. “It's like a fish tank, but it's like a prison too: it's positive and negative.”
More about La Vie au Ranch here.