André Téchiné (; born 13 March 1943) is a French screenwriter and film director. He has a long and distinguished career that places him among the most accomplished post-New Wave French film directors.
Téchiné belongs to a second generation of French film critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma who followed François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and others from criticism into filmmaking. He is noted for his elegant and emotionally charged films that often delve into the complexities of emotions and the human condition. One of Téchiné's trademarks is the examination of human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way, as can be seen in his most acclaimed films: My Favorite Season (1993) and Wild Reeds (1994).
In his films he addresses various themes related to morality and the development of modern society, such as homosexuality, divorce, adultery, family breakdown, prostitution, crime, drug addiction or AIDS.
Life André Téchiné was born on 13 March 1943 at Valence-d'Agen, a small town in the Midi-Pyrénées region, department of Tarn-et-Garonne, France.Marshall, André Téchiné, p. 2 His family, of Spanish ancestry, owned a small agricultural equipment business. He grew up in the southwest French countryside and in his adolescence acquired a passion for film. From 1952 to 1959 he went to a Catholic boarding school in Montauban. He was allowed to leave only on Sunday afternoons, when he would go to the cinema, although he often had to return before the screening ended. In 1959 he transferred to a secular state school, which exposed him to a different culture, with Marxist teachers, a film club and a film magazine, La Plume et l'écran, to which he contributed. "Films were my only opening to the world,"Riding, Finding Cinematic Gold, New York Times, 29 December 1996. Téchiné has said. "They were my only possibility of escaping my family environment and my boarding school. It was probably dangerous because, through movies, I learned how the world works and how human relations work. But it was magical, and I was determined to follow the thread of that magic."
At nineteen he moved to Paris to pursue filmmaking. He failed the entrance examination at France's most prominent film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), but started to write reviews for Cahiers du cinéma, where he worked for four years (1964–1967). His first article was about Truffaut's The Soft Skin, published in July 1964.
Téchiné's first filmmaking experience emerged from a theatrical milieu.Marshall, André Téchiné, p. 4 He went on to become assistant director for Marc'O in Les Idoles (1967), a film version of an experimental play. This film was edited by Jean Eustache; Téchiné has an uncredited walk-on appearance in Eustache's film La Maman et la putain (1972).Marshall, André Téchiné, p. 5 Téchiné was also assistant director to Jacques Rivette (his editor at Cahiers du Cinéma) on L'amour fou (1969).Marshall, André Téchiné, p. 3
Téchiné is noted for his elegant and emotionally charged films that often delve into the complexities of the human condition and emotions. One of Téchiné's trademarks is the examination of human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way. Influenced by Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Ingmar Bergman, William Faulkner, and the cinematic French New Wave, Téchiné's style lies in his exploration of sexuality and national identity, as he challenges expectations in his depictions of gay relations, the North African dimensions of contemporary French culture, or the center-periphery relationship between Paris and his native Southwest.Marshall, André Téchiné, p. back cover Fear of flying prevents him from attending most film openings or festivals more than a train ride from his Paris apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Garden.
"I never know how each film will end," Téchiné has said. "When I'm filming, I shoot each scene as if it were a short film. It's only when I edit that I worry about the narrative. My objective is to tell a story, but that's the final thing I do."
Film career
Paulina s'en va (1969) André Téchiné made his debut as director with Paulina s'en va (Paulina is Leaving) (1969), in which the title character drifts aimlessly, struggling to find a way out of her disenchantment and find her calling in life. Initially conceived as a short, the film was shot in two periods, over one week in 1967 and two weeks in 1969. Shown at that year's Venice Film Festival, it disconcerted audiences and was not released until 1975. In the meantime, Téchiné provided screenplays for other directors, including one for Liliane de Kermadec's Aloïse.
Souvenirs d'en France (1974) After working in television and theater,Armstrong et al., The Rough Guide to Film, p. 551 Téchiné first came to prominence with his second film, Souvenirs d'en France (French Provincial) (1974), a mix of black comedy, romantic drama and nostalgia with a distinct tone. The film was inspired by Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons and filmed in Téchiné's native village. It is a highly compressed history of a small-town family from early in the century through the Resistance and on to May 1968. Téchiné explored the relationship between the grand scope of life and more personal histories.Armstrong et al., The Rough Guide to Film, p. 552 The film stars Jeanne Moreau.
Barocco (1976)
Téchiné demonstrated his penchant for atmospheric storytelling with his next film, the thriller Barocco (1976), a crime drama. A boxer who accepted and then turned down a huge bribe from a politician to tell a lie that would influence an election is killed by a hired assassin. The boxer's girlfriend eventually falls in love with the killer while trying to remake him into the image of her slain lover. The film elicited critical plaudits for its elegant look.
Les sœurs Brontë (1979) Three years later, Téchiné took on biography with Les sœurs Brontë The Bronte Sisters (1979), a profile of the Brontë sisters. The film's heavy, repressive mood evokes the harshness and injustice of the life the sisters endured. The passion and color that is so vivid in their novels was absent from their daily existence, and the film's gloomy cinematography evokes this. The film features an all-star cast: Isabelle Adjani, Marie-France Pisier and Isabelle Huppert as Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, and Pascal Greggory as their ill-fated brother Branwell.
Hôtel des Amériques (1981)
Hôtel des Amériques (1981), set in Biarritz, explores the strained relationship between a successful middle-aged woman and an unfulfilled and emotionally unbalanced man in a story of hopelessly ill-matched love. This film marked a turning point in Téchiné's career, anchoring his work in a more realistic universe than the previous romantic one. For the first time Téchiné let his actors improvise, a practice he has continued ever since, adjusting his scripts to accommodate the new material. "From Hôtel des Amériques onwards my films are no longer genre films," he said. "My inspiration is no longer drawn from the cinema".Philippon, André Téchiné, p. 121 This film also started a long productive collaboration with Catherine Deneuve. "There are some directors who are more feminine than others, like Téchiné, like Truffaut. They are an exceptional gift to actresses," Deneuve has said.
Rendez-vous (1985) After making the television production La Matiouette ou l'arrière-pays (1983), Téchiné returned to critical attention with Rendez-vous (1985), a noir melodrama replete with the seductive surface of the era. In the film a would-be actress, Nina, fleeing her provincial home for Paris, enters a turbulent love relationship with a sadistic, self-destructive young actor who caused the death of his former girlfriend. When the actor himself is killed in an accident, or possible suicide, his former mentor/director, and father of the dead girlfriend, determines to cast the inexperienced Nina as the female lead in 'Romeo and Juliet', a role his deceased daughter played. By now considered by some to be a major director of the post-New Wave, Téchiné won the Cannes Festival Best Direction Award while helping launch the career of Juliette Binoche.
Le lieu du crime (1986) Le lieu du crime (1986) (Scene of the Crime) The story takes place in the rustic vicinity of a small provincial town, where a young boy helps an escaped criminal. The highly troubled youth, disaffected by his parents' divorce, lives with his mother and grandparents while the father lives nearby. The escaped convict commits murder to save the boy from harm but gets involved with the mother. By the time the boy is to have his first communion, the mother—trapped in a humdrum existence—has fallen in love with the convict and wants to run away with him.
Les innocents (1987) In Téchiné's next film, Les Innocents (1987), a young woman, born and raised in Northern France, is visiting the Mediterranean city of Toulon for the first time. She is prompted by two events: the wedding of her sister, and the disappearance of her brother, a deaf-mute who supports himself as a pickpocket under the tutelage of a young Arab and an older bisexual married man with a weakness for young Arabs. The girl meets them and finds herself attracted to the young Arab and the older man's son, who is bisexual like his father. She is soon torn between the two in a romantic and sexual dilemma that mirrors France's political turmoil over its growing Arab population.
J'embrasse pas (1991) (I Don't Kiss) (1991) is a bleak, melancholic portrait of a young man searching and failing to find meaning in his life. An idealistic 17-year-old leaves his home in the rural southwest of France, hoping to make a career as an actor in Paris. After an auspicious start, he soon discovers that he has no talent as an actor and loses both his job and his room. In the end, he has to make a living as a male prostitute. He falls in love with a young prostitute, but the relationship has terrible consequences for him.
My Favorite Season (1993) My Favorite Season (Ma saison préférée) (1993) is a dark and somber story of middle-aged estranged siblings, a provincial lawyer (sister) and a surgeon (brother). They have begun to come to terms with what they have become professionally and personally when their aging mother begins to decline after a stroke. Téchiné has called Ma Saison Préférée a film "about individuality and the coldness of the modern world." It earned acclaim when it was screened in competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
Wild Reeds (1994) The following year, Téchiné had his greatest success to date with Wild Reeds (Les roseaux sauvages) (1994). The film was commissioned by French television as one of part of a series of eight films entitled Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, although it was shown first at cinemas. This is a tale of teenage self-discovery centered on the inner turmoil of four teenagers staying at a boarding school in Aquitaine in 1962, their political and sexual awakening with the effect of the Algerian War as backdrop. Téchiné works with certain sets of themes including family bonds, homosexuality, and exile. Wild Reeds is his most autobiographical movie; like the teen-age Téchiné, the main character, François, attends an all-male boarding school. While part of the story revolves around François' discovery that he is gay, Téchiné said his principal interest was to evoke how the Algerian war of independence was felt in a rural corner of France."If I hadn't been able to inject this, if I had only been making a film about adolescent coming of age, it wouldn't have interested me at all," he explained.