The film crew © AFP / VH
OUT OF COMPETITION – Téchiné brings the Le Roux case to the screen
Five years after The Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER), André Téchiné once again takes a news item as a starting point for his screenplay. In the Name of my Daughter (L’Homme qu’on aimait trop) explores the emotional and financial torments leading up to the Le Roux case, a murder trial after the disappearance of Agnès Le Roux. Catherine Deneuve, Guillaume Canet and Adèle Haenel play the protagonists who tear each other apart in this drama, set in Nice at the Palais de la Méditerranée.
Photo from the film © RR
In the seventies, the Palais de la Méditerranée casino is doing a brisk business. Its owner, Renée, sees her daughter, Agnès, return from Africa after a failed marriage. The young woman falls for Maurice Agnelet, her mother’s right-hand man, and her desire for independence drives her to sell her shares in the business. Meanwhile, crooked dealings threaten to ruin the casino and the people involved in it.
A story of passion and rivalry, money that is siphoned off and manoeuvres by the Mafia, all the ingredients are there to concoct a drama under the sun of the Côte d’Azur. André Téchiné adopts the point of view of Renée Le Roux, the mother, drawing on her memoires, Une Femme face à la Mafia, which her son, Jean-Charles Le Roux, helped to write.
The director was particularly intrigued by the character of Agnès. Téchiné researched her correspondence with Maurice Agnelet, passionate letters, in the style of Julie de Lespinasse, the 18th century salonnière: “I love you as one should love, excessively, uncontrollably and to the point of madness and despair”.
This story is still a current legal case with the shadows of unsolved mysteries. After some hesitation, André Téchiné decided to bring the trial into the film. “It was impossible to simply ignore this judicial dimension,” he said, “the way Renée Le Roux behaved, in her absolute determination to see Maurice Agnelet condemned is an essential aspect of the drama.”
Tarik Khaldi
SCREENINGS
Wednesday 21st May / Grand Théâtre Lumière / 12 noon – 10:30 p.m.
>> View the interactive calendar
