“Paradises of Diane,” which premiered within the Panorama part of the Berlin Film Festival, got here out of an exploration of the “dark side of maternity” and the function of the mom in society, director Carmen Jaquier tells Variety.
The movie, which was directed with Jan Gassmann, begins with Diane abandoning her new-born child at a maternity clinic in Zurich, and heading to the seedy Spanish seaside resort Benidorm, with out telling anybody. Here she befriends an aged girl, Rose, and the 2 of them kind a tentative bond.
Jaquier says the concept for the movie got here from a dialog with a good friend, who confessed that she had grow to be very depressed after the delivery of her daughter. The girl hadn’t spoken about this to her mates or household. After Jaquier had written the primary draft of the script, Gassmann joined the venture and the 2 of them began to speak to girls about their experiences of giving delivery and motherhood.
When writing the script Jaquier says they have been “super connected” to Diane and her expertise, however when she and Gassmann began to pitch the venture to movie funders and acquired suggestions concerning the topic of a mom abandoning her child they “realized how violent it could be for other people and that they couldn’t have any empathy for her.”
After that they understood that there could be some individuals who wouldn’t have the ability to settle for Diane’s resolution. “We had to rethink and rebuild from that moment but for us it was super important to be straight with this character,” Jaquier says.
Gassmann provides: “The decision to leave a child poses questions to yourself such as: Would we be able to do it? What happened to the father? Is he all alone? So, we try to work with these questions, but at the same time not to have a moral view on it. The starting point was that she does that, she’s leaving and she’s in this situation, and we don’t want to judge that.”
They informed Dorothée De Koon, the actor who performs Diane, that it’s a “very courageous decision on her part to protect the others from how she is at the moment, and try to go home whenever she is ready,” Gassmann says.
“Paradises of Diane”
Courtesy of two:1 Film
In the movie, landscapes will be each exterior and inner, Gassmann says, referring to a line from Agnès Varda in “The Beaches of Agnès,” when Varda says: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” So, we see Diane exploring her emotions, sexuality and id, and that is mirrored within the landscapes she travels by way of. On the journey throughout Europe by bus Diane begins to really feel nameless, and is ready to “disappear” into the crowds in Benidorm, “a place where she seeks to rebuild herself,” Gassmann says. Opposite Rose’s condo, which overlooks the ocean, is an island, which mirrors Diane’s emotions of isolation and loneliness.
Diane begins to acknowledge that there’s something of herself in Rose. “Sometimes in life you have this special meeting with someone who could be a part of you or you in a few years or in the past,” Jaquier says.
“Paradises of Diane”
Courtesy of two:1 Film
Through her relationship with Rose, Diane sees that regardless of her resolution to depart her child there may be nonetheless a nurturing facet to her character. “It was very important to us that Diane is still capable of love, still capable of taking care of someone. So, with Rose there is this possibility for her to maybe understand something, but it’s not enough and she has to move on, to take a decision at the end. But just for a few weeks with this old woman, who has experienced something quite similar to her, there was like this question of superposition in life: That you are all the people you were during your life. We are much more than the person we are in the moment. There is some connection between you now and you in the past and future, even if you don’t know that in the present moment.”