Born in Rennes in 1966 and interpreter of a raw and visceral realism, Stéphane Brizé made his feature film debut in 1999 with Les Bleu des villes, which he co-wrote together with Florence Vignon, his usual screenwriting partner. Before that, came two short films – Bleu dommage (1993) and L’œil qui traîne (1996) – and a long apprenticeship in TV and theatre. From the latter, he probably derived the two fundamental characteristics of his cinema: the centrality of the actor and the writing sharpness, paired since the beginning with a framing/staging that rejects any effects to work intensively on time, alternating – in line with a quintessentially French tradition going from Pialat to Garrel – the dilatation of the scene with a deep ellipsis. It was his last two feature films that exposed him to a wider audience: La loi du marché (The Measure of a Man, 2015) e Une vie (A Woman’s Life, 2016). Despite being rather different from each other – the first one is the story of a man looking for work in contemporary Paris; the second is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Guy de Maupassant, set in Normandy at the beginning of the nineteenth century – both films confirm the author’s constant attention (much more than a mere “anthropological curiosity”) for the stories of the bereft and, at the same time, for social dynamics such as the ones within the family (like, for example in Quelques heure de printemps, 2012), in couple relationships (Entre adultes, 2006, almost a “study” on romantic relationships between man and woman) or work. Brizé analyses such dynamics as a form of “power play” in which the human being lives in a perpetually conflicted condition, strained between rights and duties, obligations and freedom, compliance to a role and desire to break out.
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