En moi (2016)
A blocked filmmaker wanders the Paris Opera, where every door opens onto another fantasy—and Lara Stone proves far harder to understand than to undress.
Yvan Attal plays a director arriving at the Palais Garnier to shoot his next film, only to discover that the grand machinery of cinema cannot manufacture the one thing he lacks: inspiration. Nervous, lonely and terrified of failure, he drifts away from his waiting crew and into the building’s corridors, rehearsal rooms and hidden corners. Each door takes him farther from an ordinary day’s filming and deeper into a private theatre of desire, jealousy and creative panic, where his assistant, an actress, a lover and other strange figures seem less like people than troublesome pieces of his own imagination. At the centre of it all is Lara Stone’s silent, elusive woman—the actress, muse and emotional blind spot he wants both to film and possess. Their professional relationship carries the ache of an affair in which looking has replaced...
listening: he can photograph her skin, stage her body and surround himself with female beauty, yet still fail to see the person offering herself to his camera. A parade of nude women pushes that contradiction to its cheekiest extreme, turning the filmmaker’s hungry gaze into something absurd, anxious and faintly nightmarish. Laetitia Casta, making her directing debut, is less interested in tidy storytelling than in showing how creation feels from inside a rattled head. The film moves like a fever dream, with reality, memory, erotic fantasy and the mechanics of filmmaking continually bleeding into one another. Some viewers will find it self-conscious and a touch overcooked; others will enjoy its nerve, Attal’s frazzled performance and the way it questions who is consuming whom—the man behind the camera or the woman who knows exactly how powerfully the camera responds to her. It is not a conventional romance or erotic drama, but a compact, unsettling meditation on the old combustible triangle of art, love and lust.
Although made in 2016, the film lives in that timeless French-art-cinema world where tortured directors smoke metaphorical cigarettes even when no cigarette is present. Shot inside Paris’s magnificent Palais Garnier, it uses gilded halls, red velvet, staircases and backstage gloom as chambers of the hero’s mind. The vibe is elegant, cerebral and sexually charged, with a nightmarish edge beneath all the cultured Parisian polish.
Lara Stone does not give a chatty, conventional performance; her allure lies in withholding herself. Tall, blonde, cool and striking, she carries the knowing sensuality of a woman accustomed to being watched but not necessarily understood. Casta uses Stone’s model poise, expressive stillness and unusual beauty as the film’s main erotic weapon. There is substantial full-frontal female nudity in the broader ensemble and the imagery is deliberately provocative, though this is art-house exposure rather than simulated sex. Stone’s own impact comes less from explicit action than from the unnerving suggestion that while the director thinks he is devouring her with his gaze, she may have had him for breakfast already.
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