Memories Of Media: An Interview With Carine Tardieu

The multitalented Carine Tardieu is an award-winning writer-director of short films and features, working in both television and cinema, as well as being an acclaimed children's novelist. Formatively inspired by Roald Dahl's more outlandish writings, after fitful studies in psychology and nursing, Tardieu found her vocation as a highly media-literate storyteller, exploring the inner lives of adolescents both mesmerized and frustrated by the bizarre adult world around them. Initially Tardieu conceived of her nonrealist narratives, whether words or images, primarily as a way of transcribing her youthful fantasies and dreams, to distill a solitary childhood consumed by her escapist passions: devouring novels and films. Central to this approach, though, is Tardieu's stylized intertextuality, representing traumatic memories on-screen via legacy formats and personal archives.

From these points of departure, Tardieu's sparkling career began. After graduating from L'École Supérieure de Realisation Audiovisuelle (ESRA), Tardieu continued to write while she

Figure 1.

Carine Tardieu. Courtesy of Michaël Crotto.

worked her way up through the filmmaking ranks, initially as a trainee assistant and grip on productions like Martine Dugowson's Portraits chinois (1996) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Jeanne et le garçon formidable (1998); gravitating toward casting extras for Andrzej Zulawski's La Fidélité (2000); then acquiring more hands-on experience, as second assistant director, on Rithy Panh's Que la barque se brise, que la jonque s'entrouve (2001). After meeting, and being mentored by, writer-director Michel Leclerc, Tardieu successfully pitched to France 2, where she wrote episodes of the ironically titled cult TV series Age sensible (2002), set in an unruly college dorm. Emboldened, Tardieu wrote and directed two prize-winning shorts, Les Baisers des autres (2003) and L'Aîné de mes soucis (2004), the former thanks to a twenty-thousand- euro grant from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée (CNC). After being commissioned to adapt both shorts as ciné-novels, Tardieu's career flourished. She published children's books, Je ne suis pas soeur Emmanuelle (2009) and Des Poules et des gateaux (2010), and was writer-director of two successful comedy-drama feature films, gaining a reputation as an accomplished director of child actors.

La Tête de maman (2007), Tardieu's acclaimed debut feature, starring Karin Viard and Kad Merad, depicts the misadventures of a driven, introspective girl, the fifteen-year-old Lulu (Chloé Coulloud), who propels her increasingly depressive mother to reconnect—whether she likes it or not—with an old boyfriend. Key to the film is how Lulu engages literally and figuratively with media archives to try to understand her withdrawn mother and her estranged parents. Indeed, when Lulu discovers a cache of old photographs, home movies, and cans of 16mm filmmaking in the attic of her unhappy family's home, Tardieu uses legacy formats as her pivotal dramatic device. Whether it is shots of Holocaust newsreels projected behind a silhouetted parent's back or animated vintage postcards that bring her moribund mother back to life again, images from the past, citations of twentieth-century media formats, are what highlight generational drift, the alienation of children from adults, and the process of aging and attrition. One signature Tardieu set piece, in which Lulu watches in secret, enraptured, rediscovered 16mm footage of her mother's younger self, deliriously happy with her old boyfriend, flickering into life on a garden wall, underlines this trajectory.

Based on a popular bande dessinée, the more overtly fantastical Du Vent dans mes mollets (2012), another star-studded production (with Agnès Jaoui, Denis Podalydès, Isabelle Carré, and Isabella Rossellini), set in the 1980s, also focuses on a young girl's anarchic reactions to a constrictive domestic situation, framed strategically via archival media citations as repressed images from the past. This time, the catalytic figure is nine-year-old Rachel (Juliette Gombert), initially shy and withdrawn, whose rebellious awakening—after a libertarian girl, Valérie (Anna Lemarchand), joins her school—parallels, and instigates, her parents' renewed...