Garçonnières

Interview With Director Céline Pernet

How was the idea for the film born?

Céline Pernet: I had a period in my life where I used dating apps a lot. It was shortly after #metoo. I felt invigorated by this new feminist momentum that filled my heart and made me stronger and more confident. I was ready to take the lead and listen more to my desires and needs. I met a lot of men, and my curiosity often led me to ask them questions about how they felt, how they lived in the present time, how they dealt with relationships and sexuality, etc. I threw some of them off with my questions, but I felt they had a real desire to explore these topics, even though it wasn’t always obvious and they clearly weren’t used to doing it. At the same time, I could hear more and more men around me gritting their teeth. I was completely riding this wave of women’s liberation with the feeling that things were finally going to move and at the same time I could already feel the annoyance coming from the male population. I wanted to know more. Something was going on with the guys, and this hubbub of frustration, fear and misunderstanding was becoming more and more deafening in my daily life. I wanted to try to get to the bottom of it in my own way, using two tools that I love; intimate talk and film.

Why did you choose this particular generation?

C.P.: I am a pure product of the 80s. I was a teenager in the 90s and early 2000s. Decades which lived, in my opinion, a no man’s land in terms of feminist actions or reflections. In any case, in my daily environment, no one asked the question of gender roles and the distribution of tasks in sentimental, family or professional relationships. The boys were happily dressed in blue and the girls in pink, we were fed sitcoms as caricatured and sexist as the others and the most popular music groups were boy’s bands full of muscular and tanned boys who would win over the girls at a glance. In the movies, American Pie, Bridget Jones and Pretty Woman were all over the place, and advertising was not afraid to show lustful, objectified women and powerful, aggressive men; images and stories that shaped the imagination of the young girl I was. In this film, I wanted to talk with men who shared the same liabilities with me and who had grown up in the same decades as I did. Men who today find themselves a bit caught between two chairs. Like me, they wonder what to keep from their education and what kind of individual they want to be tomorrow.

How did you find all these men, did you know them?

C.P.: I don’t know them and I’ve only met them once, at the time of the interview. I realised quite quickly that this subject – gender issues in general – could become very emotional, especially with people you know too well. I myself was not immune to losing my temper with a friend. And I wanted us to be able to talk and listen to each other without going overboard. I decided to call on strangers by posting an ad on social networks. After a successful first attempt with about 20 men in early 2019, I received more than 50 responses when I published my ad in 2020.

How did you go about choosing the characters?

C.P.: The trials I did in 2019 immediately showed that the spontaneity and sincerity of these encounters were essential elements for the success of these moments spent one-on-one. This device creates a unique relationship; an instant discovery of the other captured on the 7spot where the quality of the emotion that emerges is the most natural and sensitive. I wanted to keep this during the shooting in 2020 and therefore decided to see all the men who offered themselves without meeting them beforehand and without casting. The final choice of characters was made during the editing. We had to make a difficult choice among all these voices, all these personalities to keep only the strongest ones dramatically speaking, those who worked best together.

Why let the men speak?

C.P.: I am convinced that addressing – together – the new masculinities and the infinite possibilities of being a man is an integral part of a long-term feminist approach. As soon as we question gender roles, injunctions and expectations of society, we shake the established patriarchal order a little more. I am a woman, I am straight. There are men that I love, that I desire, and I want us to work together so that in the future no one has to irremediably correspond to the all-powerful norm that prevents us all from letting ourselves be, live and meet freely.

Did you encounter any difficulties because you are a woman?

C.P.: I didn’t really encounter any difficulties. The men always welcomed me with open arms. My camera opened many doors for me, even in places that were not used to welcoming a woman. But it is certain that my gender influenced the exchanges during the interviews and the behavior of the men in the places I explored. It’s not a small thing when a woman comes to your house, your living room or your kitchen and asks you questions about your intimacy for 3 hours! There is a bit of apprehension, embarrassment, and also seduction in the exchange. I reversed the balance of power a bit and I was the one holding the reins in a way. But, as many of them told me, that’s what they liked. If the request had come from a man, they would have been more wary and would have feared a form of competition or judgment.

What do you retain from this shooting and these meetings?

C.P.: It allowed me to feel more confident, stronger and even more legitimate in front of the men around me in my private and professional life. The message of the film is that it is possible to talk to each other, to listen to each other, to laugh together and to disagree as well, but that it requires energy, time and a personal investment from each of us. There are men who sincerely wonder about their place in the world and who wish to be something other than what is expected of them. But nothing is simple when it comes to gender identity, models, social norms or historically and socially constructed myths and injunctions. We test, we grope, we make mistakes and we try again in the hope of opening the door to a new field of possibilities.