It’s been since my first book, I’m fine, don’t worry, that I haven’t played with this effect of suspense. At the beginning of the book, there is a woman from the village who is found dead. Everyone knows her, everyone is devastated and at the same time, all the local men can be suspicious in some way. There’s a side of, as the Americans say, whodunnit – who did it? Very quickly, suspicion falls on Antoine, who is the central thread of the book. A priori, even if there is always a doubt, the reader is more in the idea that this is a culprit a little too ideal for it to be honest. And one of the driving forces of the book is how he will deal with all that. Afterwards, I really believe in something – I’ve experienced it, I’ve been writing 15 novels, I’ve written films, etc. – is that we build characters, we immerse them in a particular plot, and at a given moment, they have a fatality of their own. And I would be inclined to say that I don’t choose; there is something of fate, of destiny. And what’s more, beyond the noir novel aspect, this book really plays with the idea of tragedy almost in the primary sense of the term.
It was essential, but I didn’t find it right away. What I wanted was indeed behind closed doors, but a tourist place where there are almost no tourists and where we therefore find ourselves in a sort of private space. At the beginning, I wrote this in Brittany, as I often do, but I quickly realized that the question of the open sea was complicated; I needed to lock in my characters even more [laughs]. So I had the plot, the journey of the book and its beginning, then I was invited to a literary festival on the banks of Lake Annecy, in Talloires, a very chic and beautiful little village. And there it was obvious: I knew where I was going to place my plot.
There is a real connection between the two books. First of all, Below the Roses is very worked on by the theater. And I also pushed it further in this book, particularly with the monologues facing the camera, so to speak, interrogations which resemble little theater monologues.
The other link with Dessous les roses is the family model that I work with: we are in a very classic family – three children, two parents – a somewhat dominant model, we will say, and therefore in itself very representative of something in ultra-patriarchal family structures. And it interests me because it is the laboratory of a society which is itself extremely marked by the question of patriarchy. It is a metaphor for society as a whole.
I worked on the issue of refugees, the rise in the popular vote for populist and far-right parties, kidnappings between France and Japan… At a given moment, life means that, suddenly, something something hits me somehow more strongly. Movement
