If We Shadows Have Offended

My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (Arnaud Desplechin, 1996)

Ibsen's Psychological Theater

Theater is one of Arnaud Desplechin's great passions. He has directed plays such as Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991), but, like Ingmar Bergman (one of his great influences), he is more interested in exploring the boundary lines connecting theater and film. This manifests itself in film/video/theater hybrids like Léo, Playing 'In the Company of Men' (2003) or The Forest (2014) and also in feature films like Esther Kahn (2000).
In Esther Kahn, the eponymous Jewish thespian in 19th century London discovers her gifts as a performer through Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) [1]. By focusing on cinematic point-of-view, Desplechin manages to move back-and-forth between the space of performance and the world behind-the-stage in a way that reworks and reinflects diverse cinematic influences (from Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, 1941 to Jean Renoir's French Cancan, 1955) while also deepening the psychological force of Ibsen's text. Desplechin's script annotations show how carefully this was planned.
Ibsen's more fantastical Peer Gynt (1867) (also critical for Fritz Lang's M, 1931) is connected to a Bergman-like direct address in the extract from My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument to the left. This brief two-shot sequence connects two forms of camera movement: an exterior tracking shot and a slowly progressing exploration of the physical and spiritual contours of the human face.

Isabelle Huppert on Theater and Film Acting

Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.”

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1605), Act V, Scene 1

The opening of Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

All the World's a Stage

Both Hedda Gabler and especially Peer Gynt defy the simplistic understanding of Ibsen's approach as materialist in conviction and orientation. Like many of Ibsen's later works, they are fundamentally preoccupied with the inscrutability of human motivation and the mysterious interchange between dream and reality.
This Symbolist aspect of Ibsen's plays deeply informed the theater and film work of Ingmar Bergman (who adapted plays by Ibsen many times). The beginning of his autobiographical epic Fanny and Alexander (1982) demonstrates the cinema's startling capacity to open up an uncanny liminal space. Like Desplechin's autobiographical surrogates, Bergman's dreamy protagonist is learning how to use his craft to open up new, visionary modes of seeing (in which even statues appear to come to life).
These Symbolist influences are also evident in both the Expressionist theater productions of Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) and his unique Hollywood production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), which includes overt allusions to the mythic landscapes of influential painter Arnold Böcklin (see below).
Desplechin combines both of these models in the first extract from A Christmas Tale (2008) near the bottom. Like Reinhardt's film, which the young Paul Dédalus is watching on TV, Desplechin repeatedly makes use of Felix Mendelssohn's 1826 overture for the Shakespeare play. Both the play and the music return in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013), where the connections between performance, religion, and psychoanalysis are deepened.
Like Shakespeare's 1605 play [2], Desplechin's fantasia opens in a different register and ends with a circular resolution that leaves open the possibility of new adventures. Significantly, in Desplechin's case, the "awakening" described in the final scene takes place not in his birthplace of Roubaix, but in his adopted home of Paris.