Bertrand Bonello
Bertrand Bonello’s movies coalesce into a saga of political disillusionments. His characters are would-be revolutionaries, doomed youths, and indecisive figures paralyzed in the face of new political futures. Grappling with his cinema requires context of his birth-year. In 1968, France was in the midst of Les Trente Glorieuses, three decades of post-WWII economic development, modernization, and mass consumerism. Despite a long revolutionary lineage, large-scale protest movements lay mostly…
Defining films
In their own words
What I really loved about it, as well as the artificiality, was the use of time and space. The film feels really claustrophobic and the character gets into a sort of delirium. That's something I was looking for, for Saint Laurent.
I think about things like Ophuls, or maybe something like Scorsese's New York, New York, for the feeling of being trapped.
I thought about Welles and Citizen Kane, of course, because of the idea of having someone talk about a character, without ever fully getting to him. But also about Visconti and The Damned.
For the second part of the movie in the shopping mall, I told my cinematographer that I wanted it to be like a mix between George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's The Last Days.
