The 'French Woody Allen', actor-director Agnès Jaoui tells Lara Marloweabout her new film which tackles sexism, racism and middle-class malaise in her native France
IF THERE were a French Woody Allen, it would be Agnès Jaoui. Jaoui, 44, has been writing screenplays and acting, often with her partner Jean-Pierre Bacri, for the past 22 years. She has directed the couple's last three films, including Let's Talk About the Rain (Parlez-moi de la Pluie),which is released in Dublin today.
Jaoui's films are funny, bitter-sweet and often critical portrayals of contemporary French society. "We're inspired by people we know," she explains. In their apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, she and Bacri write from 3pm until 7pm daily, "with two notebooks, and two pens". Only when the final version of a screenplay is ready do they take it to a secretary for typing. Though her films give the impression of improvisation, Jaoui confesses to being a control freak: "Everything is written, down to the last comma," she says.
In The Taste of Others(2000), a businessman falls in love with an actress, but they find it hard to adapt to each other's milieux. Look at Me(2004) was about how power and success corrupt not only an individual, but his entourage.
Jaoui and Bacri have a following, and more than a million French people went to see Let's Talk About the Rainin the month following its release. In it, Jaoui plays the lead role of Agathe Villanova, a 40-ish French writer and feminist who returns to southern France a year after her mother's death to sort out family business and launch her political campaign for the regional elections.
Michel Ronsard (played by Bacri) is a documentary film-maker whose career has fizzled out, and who is having an affair with Agathe's sister, Florence. Jamel Debbouze plays Karim, the son of the Villanova family's ageing housekeeper Mimouna, who left Algeria with her employers at the time of decolonisation. Karim studied film-making under Ronsard, and their characters persuade Agathe to participate in a documentary about "women who've succeeded".
The character of Agathe is the sort of career woman who is late for appointments and is constantly receiving and sending messages on her mobile phone. I felt certain Jaoui would be late for our interview in a Paris café, and sure enough, she bustled in 20 minutes late, mobile phone in hand; life imitating art. In Let's Talk About the Rain, Karim and Ronsard's attempts to interview the ambitious Agathe turn into a series of catastrophes - scenes that are funny to any journalist, but which inspire a certain apprehension about interviewing Jaoui.
Yes, she admits, Agathe Villanova has a lot of Agnès Jaoui in her. "We exaggerated her 'stiff-upper-lip' side," Jaoui says. Like the sisters in the film, Jaoui recently lost her mother. On their mother's tomb in the film, Agathe's sister Florence tells how she felt unloved as a child; Agathe was always the favourite. "There's no point moaning about it 30 years later," Agathe says curtly.
The main difference between her and her film character is this "why don't they pull themselves out of it" attitude, which Jaoui dismisses as "almost a right-wing way of reasoning". But sorting through childhood photographs, Agathe later realises how pampered she was, and the extent to which their mother cold-shouldered her sister. She leaves a long, weepy telephone message on her estranged boyfriend's voicemail. The dominating woman has become human.
"It's the main theme of all our films," Jaoui says: "Can people change?" The answer? "Rarely, with difficulty, but yes," she replies.
Let's Talk About the Rainis also about prejudice and discrimination. Karim delivers a searing lecture to Agathe about the way French people automatically address him and his mother Mimouna by the familiar "tu", because they are immigrants from north Africa.
In real life, Jaoui says sexism is rampant in France. For example, at working dinners, men used to talk to Bacri all evening without even looking at her. "It happens less now, because I've succeeded, because I'm well known; that makes up for the lack of a penis," she says. In the film, Karim thinks Agathe is bossy. "Any woman who is autonomous, independent and who succeeds - any woman politician - will always be accused of being bossy," she says. Jaoui is still angry with the socialist politician Laurent Fabius, who on learning that Ségolène Royal sought the party's presidential nomination, said, "But who will look after the children?"
Jaoui says she deliberately transgressed a taboo by writing into Agathe Villanova's part the fact that she has no children and does not want them. "I don't think there's been a positive woman character in the cinema who says, 'No. I don't want children'. Or else she gets pregnant at the end of the film and she's happy and keeps it."
After an eight-year wait, Jaoui and Bacri have just adopted a Brazilian brother and sister, age seven and five. When the baby-sitter stops by the café where we're talking with her new son, Jaoui cuddles him and speaks to him in Portuguese. She learned the language to be able to communicate with her adopted children, and spent three months with them in Rio de Janeiro before bringing them back to Paris.
In addition to being a director, actor and screenwriter, Jaoui sings with a Latin American band. Her CD Canta won the world music album of the year at the 2007 Victoires de la Musique awards. She believes the attraction of South America is its similarity to Tunisia, which her parents left before she was born: "There's a human warmth there. People touch each other. You're outside most of the time."
Like the Villanova family in Let's Talk About the Rain, the Jaoui and Bacri families had to leave north Africa. Their circumstances were modest, Jaoui says. "My grandfather was a carpenter. Jean-Pierre's father was a postman. They weren't French colonialists."
Jaoui was born in a suburb of Paris. Bacri was born in Algeria. Both their families are Jewish. Bacri, she says, "hates all forms of sectarianism. He doesn't go to Israel, doesn't observe Kippur or Sabbath. He's Jewish when there's anti-Semitism, full stop."
Her own situation is "slightly more complex", Jaoui says. Her parents were "soixante-huitards", as the student rebels of May 1968 are known. "In the beginning, they were Zionist communists, then they were hippie types who studied psychiatry and became atheists."
The sense of a lost north African paradise, embellished by memory and perpetuated by family photographs, underlies Let's Talk About the Rain. "We also wanted to talk about the legacy of the colonies, and about the fact that we're the second or third generation of immigrants, but it's still present," says Jaoui. "France hasn't really come to terms with it; the labour of memory takes half a century, but it hasn't been done. It took a long time for France to ask forgiveness for deporting Jews, and Vichy [the collaborationist regime] hasn't been completely unearthed yet. No, the French aren't very good at this sort of thing."
Jaoui says she wanted to be an actress "because princess wasn't possible, or else I would have had to marry a guy, and marriage never made me dream".
"I was incredibly lucky to meet Jean-Pierre," says Jaoui. She has spent half her life with Bacri. Though he was already known as an actor, they were immediately successful as playwrights and screenwriters when they began working together. They've won four César awards for best writing, the best screenplay award at the 2004 Cannes film festival and the European Film Awards, and the René Clair Award in 2001.
Jaoui is lucid about her own creative motivation. "I wanted to be recognised. I wanted to be loved, and I wanted to be sure I existed." It seems ironic that a sense of insecurity is the source of such confident film-making. "Yes," Jaoui admits. "I feel panic at the thought of death. I read the Diary of Anne Frankwhen I was 11, and it marked me very, very deeply. I've been keeping a diary for the past 33 years. That's why writing has always been part of my life. I had to write so that if I disappeared, people would know I'd been alive, so that I'd know myself I'd been alive."
• Let's Talk About the Rain (Parlez-moi de la Pluie)is out today
