Three films starring Ludivine Sagnier screened in Los Angeles this spring and summer. Love Crime and The Devil’s Double were shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June. Lily Sometimes was shown at the City of Angels, City of Light Festival in April.
I met up with Ludivine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to talk about the wounded souls she brings to life in her films and where she finds the freaky stuff to feed them.
In Love Crime Ludivine Sanginer plays a young woman working in a corporation at La Défense, the cluster of skyscrapers in metropolitan Paris constructed to separate the corporate world from the cities famous arrondissements.
Isabel Guérin is a creative young executive overflowing with ideas but oblivious to the duplicity of people in the corporate environment. Her boss steals her ideas and manipulates her emotions. She does not have the capacity to realize she is being exploited.
In the absence of the hard won social skills that would enable her to deactivate her bosses behaviour, a cauldron of emotion starts to boil beneath the surface of their relationship.
La Défense – named after La Défense de Paris, the famous statue commerating soldiers of the Franco-Prussian war – becomes a battlefield where Isabel’s payload of emotion explodes and she turns her creativity to strategies of revenge.
“Isabel is based on desires that it is not easy to express,” said Ludivine. “I think Isabel is someone who is very good at what she does, she is excellent, she is a very brilliant person. I think we all know the sort of person who has been targeting their whole life towards one single goal and you know she has been obsessed with studies and success but humanly speaking she is completely immature.”
