Céline Devaux's Everybody Loves Jeanne is now showing exclusively on MUBI from July 27, 2023, in many countries—including the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Turkey, Canada, and Mexico—in the series Debuts.
Devaux's notebook.
Everybody Loves Jeanne started out as an attempt to write a fictional journal. I created this ecological superhero character, Jeanne Mayer, who's a bundle of fear and arrogance because she's busy saving the world, no less. I told myself that this was the most useful job in the world today, and that it must be really terrible to fail at it. I took this moment of failure and made it the story of the film. I took a very difficult moment in a woman’s life, and put it under a microscope.
I wanted to collect someone's thoughts, all of them, from the most ridiculous to the most secret, from the most grandiose to the most trivial, in an attempt to re-establish the experience of a moment. Namely, a synchronism between the real world and our perception of it.
I'm listening to someone talk to me, but I'm looking at the piece of parsley between his teeth. I think he's wearing the same perfume as someone I once loved. I remember the hands of this person I once loved. I wonder if I forgot to send an important letter. I realize I'm no longer listening to what the person is saying. I feel guilty for having missed the moment. The moment was just a collection of all these sensations.
I tried to see how it could translate into a cinematic object. I was looking for a way to break the cathartic contract by seeking another link with the viewer: a visual means of representing thoughts, if possible the most sincere and outrageous ones. That's how I came up with the character of Jeanne’s animated inner voice. It looks like a little ghost, a devilish wig that whispers everything she doesn't want to hear—her shame, her sadness, her desire. It was also a visual bridge to more abstract scenes in animation, because drawing allows you to represent anything—even grief, even the dead.
Devaux's notebook.
I wrote for years, drew tons of visual representations of anxiety, memory, shame. In the end I took all the material I had, and went to shoot. Blanche Gardin took the character to another level of simplicity and depth. You could literally see Jeanne Mayer boiling inside when she was supposed to keep calm.
Research for Everybody Loves Jeanne (2022).
We edited everything together with Gabrielle Stemmer, trying to keep in mind that we could always reinvent material to tell this particular story. I went back at night to my studio and drew animated sequences that we had thought of during the day. Suddenly the film was as complex and fickle as the precious experience I wanted to tell.
Devaux's notebook.
I find the experience of being a woman extremely difficult, but also extremely funny. Since for years we haven't been given the opportunity to laugh at female triviality, there's a whole boulevard of complex, incorrect characters to write. All those roles have already been given to men in cinema and are a bit stale now. For women, they are brand new, and rich with years of secrecy.