This month we’ll be opening the intense new French thriller IN THE NAME OF MY DAUGHTER, (originally L’homme qu’on aimait trop). Directed by master André Téchiné (My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds), Catherine Deneuve stars as a glamorous casino owner in 1970s Nice. The drama begins when her daughter (Adèle Haenel) moves back home, falls in love with her mother’s formerly trusted adviser (Guillaume Canet), commits a major betrayal and then disappears. Thirty years later, her mother is determined to see justice done. M. Téchiné sat for an interview about his latest film:

The film started out as a commission. What did they want you to do?

Originally, the idea was for me to make a loose adaptation of Renée Le Roux’s memoirs, Une femme face à la mafia (lit: A woman up against the Mafia) written by her son Jean- Charles. From the outset, I knew that I wanted Catherine Deneuve to play the part of Renée Le Roux. The book tells the story of the casino wars on the French Riviera between the 1970s–1980s, from the protagonist’s point of view. It includes the account of the take-over of Madame Le Roux’s Palais de le Mediterranée casino by Jean-Dominique Fratoni, with the support of Jacques Medecin, the then-mayor of Nice. The casinos in this story are a far cry from the casinos of today. In fact, some of the most popular ones, like the ntc33, operate solely as online casinos now. It adds to the growing list of online casino websites that players can enjoy from the comfort of their own homes. Casinos are becoming more accessible, with some allowing their users to play and deposit with phone credit and other amenities. However, this abundance of online casinos isn’t necessarily a good thing. Back in the 1970s-1980s, when the story was set, you knew how good a casino was because of its reputation. You could guarantee that lots of people would have visited them and could give an opinion on them. Today, there are so many online casinos, meaning there will be many which won’t have been played by people you know, so you won’t know how good they are. This is where sites like Casino Martini come in handy; they review online casinos like Barbados so you know which ones are best to use.

What interested you about this story?

I focused my attention on the relationship between Renée Le Roux, her daughter Agnès, and Maurice Agnelet: the iron-fisted mother, the rebellious daughter and Agnelet’s desire for recognition by society. It was Agnès that I was most interested in. I wanted to paint her portrait. I agreed to make the film after reading the letters that Agnès had written to Agnelet because, quite unexpectedly, I found a surprising resemblance with another female character that I had long wanted to bring to the screen, Julie de Lespinasse. There are many parallels between the passionate love letters of this woman of letters and Agnes – heir to the Palais de la Mediterranée’s – letters. For example: “I love you how you must be loved, with excess, madness, ardor and despair.”

You turned the story of the casino wars into a story of psychological confrontation that takes on a myth-like status.

This is a war film. But on a human level. I was determined not to remove the events that drive the plot. I wanted to show the process of a takeover of power, the methods used to bring down a casino, the workings of a business in this very shady environment with all the elements of cruelty and servitude. I wanted to follow through on all the events that really happened until the downfall, until defeat. This war-like aspect structures the narrative.

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From Sarah Moroz’s New York Magazine piece about SAINT LAURENT, which we open at the Royal on May 8 and the Town Center and Playhouse on May 15:

As far as films about designers go, Yves Saint Laurent is having a moment. A documentary, L’Amour Fou, about the designer’s history with his once-lover and long-term business partner Pierre Bergé came out in 2010, and Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent opened in January, for which Bergé — now the keeper of the designer’s estate — granted its filmmaker complete access to the house’s archives. It’s going to be a must watch for fashionistas the world over, although it might have you spending quite a lot on designer fashion afterwards (unless you buy from Luxurytastic Replicas that is, in which case you’d get virtually the same product for half the price).
Now comes this year’s “other” Saint Laurent film: SAINT LAURENT, the unauthorized biopic directed by Bertrand Bonello. Bergé damned this version in the press (and threatened to sue Bonello for it in 2013) — but it’s already received glowing reviews for its fluid approach to an often heavy-handed genre. At a recent screening at the Paris club Le Silencio, Bonello chalked up the tandem productions to Zeitgeist. “Saint Laurent died in 2008. Around 2010, people started talking about making a film,” and, in 2012, he says, his production and Lespert’s version “started at the same time.” Bonello decided to push back his release to finish it (it opened in limited release in Paris last week). Last May, it was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics before it even went to Cannes, and France has already submitted it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a candidate for Best Foreign Film.

Here, seven things you need to know about the new Saint Laurent movie.

It focuses on a different time in the designer’s life. Bonello admitted some tailoring to his script had to be done: “When I got wind of what the other film was about, more or less, I cut the beginning of my own film to enter more directly into the heart of the movie.” His delves into the era during which “Yves Saint Laurent was already extremely famous. There isn’t at all, like in the other film, an initial meeting with Pierre Bergé, the birth of the maison, there isn’t the ascension … we attack with someone who is already at his peak.” The decade in question is 1967 to 1976, zigging and zagging between Saint Laurent’s atelier, his nightlife excursions, his trysts, his pill-popping binges, his opulent home. A “flash-forward” look into designer’s later life (circa 1989–1990) is brusquely evoked in the latter part, almost à la Lost.

It was made on a budget. The fact that the two movies were made simultaneously created a lot of production issues — especially in the financial department. “Economically speaking, having two films about Saint Laurent in a fragile market … we all cut our budgets,” said Bonello, who disclosed that the film was made for 8 million euros rather the original figure of 15. “We weren’t sure if there would be one film, two films, zero films, based on what the market could absorb.”

The fact that Berge didn’t get involved may have been a good thing. Bergé and the Fondation Piere Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent gave their blessing to Lespert’s film while damning this production. Bonello admitted in interviews that he had not wanted to meet with Bergé before having fleshed out his own vision, which he says caused Bergé to feel slighted. But Bonello said that he felt relieved that he ultimately didn’t have to deal with Bergé’s creative input. Ultimately, although Bergé did not grant Bonello access to the Yves Saint Laurent archives, the production had, crucially, the backing of François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering (which owns the Saint Laurent brand).

This version is getting much better reviews. Lespert’s film received lukewarm reviews — Le Monde called it “disappointing” and wrote that the director “merely reduces the life of the fashion designer to a simple story.” Bonello’s version is, on the other hand, is already being acclaimed.L’Express described it as: “masterful film directing … each narrative decision required above all a cinematographic film resolution.”

Clothes don’t get the short shrift. Gaspard Ulliel, playing the namesake designer — in spot-on reincarnation casting — is turned out in trim suits and oversize bow ties, by way of costume designer Anaïs Romand. Léa Seydoux as Loulou de la Falaise orbits in fabulous boho garb. But the real fashion star of the movie is Louis Garrel as Jacques De Bascher, Saint Laurent’s lover ( … also Karl Lagerfeld’s), who is impeccably outfitted and, simply, unmatched.

The film also expertly articulates the designer’s style philosophy. When a client (in a cameo by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Carla Bruni’s actress sister) hesitantly tries on a gray menswear suit, Saint Laurent reassures her that thanks to the trouser pockets, she can go out with just the essentials: her keys and pack of cigarettes.

Fashion is put in context with the times. For one of the sequences, Bonello juxtaposed the runway looks with black-and-white footage of protests, military tanks, and scenes of activism that characterized the societal turmoil of the late ‘60s — effectively putting the clothes within the historical circumstances of its time.

It gets a little imaginative, too. Bonello reimagined behind-the-scenes of shoot of Saint Laurent’s “le smoking,” photographed by Helmut Newton in 1975 for French Vogue, in which one woman appears dressed in black menswear suiting and the other is naked.

In the sequence, Bonello depicts them discussing fashion and lamenting the cold. Their chatter is a little overly self-aware, but it’s the perfect symbol for the film: It goes beyond the flat glamour of familiar imagery and takes a guess at what’s beneath the surface.