Frédéric Hambale on a paranormal trap of parents ‘What Marielle knows’

When the German director Frédéric Hambale first started writing What Marielle knowsHe had no children. By the time the movie finally arrived on the screen, premiered by showing competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, he had two. As it turns out, parenting would unexpectedly design the film.

In the dark drama of a high concept, Hambale performs a social experiment. Titular teenage girl (played by Laeni Geiseler, Revelation) receives telepathic powers after her best friend knocked her in her face. Suddenly, Marielle has the power to see and hear what her mother Julia (Julia Jentsch) and her father, Tobias (Felix Kramer), do at work, mastering smoke and flirting with office colleagues or involving a pillow in a bedroom with closed doors. Suddenly, under observation 24/7, Tobias and Julia are forced to face their hypocrisy and contradictions.

“The idea, before I had children, came when someone showed me a baby phone, where you could watch their bedroom and it somehow felt wrong, such an invasion of privacy,” Hambale says. “I started thinking about how privacy works in the family. When I became a father myself, I found that it was more interesting to switch a perspective on my parents to put the audience in their shoes. “

How would you behave, wonders if you knew your kids were watching you?

“When you raise children, you give them this illusion that they need to behave: no sweets, don’t fight, share your toys, etc., but realize you don’t exercise what you preach,” he says. “We have a child as a moral authority that can stand over to parents, judging as (all visible) to God. “

And that God, as any parent of a teenager can confirm, can be judged and relentless. Marielle looks at her mother (r-valid) flirting with college such as adultery. Dad’s attempt to impose his will at a marketing meeting – to impress a daughter he knows he is watching – he ends up in a disaster. While the family family facade is smeared, Hambale balances the drama with an absurd comedy, as when Julia decides to turn an office in the opportunity for sex education.

“Like the movie Yorgos Lanthimos, a co-redeemed with M. Night Shyamalan,” was a verdict of a Hollywood critic reporter Jordan Mintzer.

“I tried to create situations that could be funny and absurd, dramatic and tragic,” Hambale says. “Interestingly, the international audience makes the movie as much ridiculous.”

Hambale knew that the movie would depend on Casting Marielle. “She’s just amazing,” he says from Geiseler. “She has an incredible presence, a very smart and incredible actress who holds a mystery.” He said her age – Marielle 13 – was key. “It’s that point, on the verge of puberty, still with a little of your child’s innocence, but where you could feel that she could understand more things for adults.”

With the focus on Marielle’s parents – “At no point in the movie, the viewer knows no more than parents,” notes Hambalel – Marielle remains an enigma in the center of the movie. We never find out what Marielle thinks, even less what she knows. The parents of a teenager can be connected again.

The cinema of the film enhances its themes of voyeurism and moral supervision. Instead of using a subjective perspective to evoke the supernatural power of Marielle and making a movie “Glistening For dolls, “says Hambale, he crawled the camera on the characters,” as if they were another person in the room, slowing down moving forward, step by step. “The director even added a subtle sound of steps to the sound side to evoke the sense of approaching the entity.

With your mixture of storytelling with a high concept and sharp social comments, What Marielle knows The main potential of remake, although some of the sexual conversations with an accelerated mouth may not make the Disney version cutting.

One of the surprised pleasures in this year’s Berlinale competition, another feature of Frédéric Hambalen manages to challenge and delight its view of the sensitive balance between honesty and privacy in the family. He lets the audience decide who, if anyone is, right.

“The movie does not apply to whether parents are good or bad,” he concludes. “It’s about what happens when there is no place to hide.”