It is nice to let your camera roam around places and people. Places that have been created with a specific aim in mind and the people to be found there now. For instance the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. You won’t find any English there now; rather pensioners or the inevitable illegal hawker from Senegal. If you start a conversation with him, he’ll say he’s the son of a prince or an ambassador. Yet it will still be a spontaneous dialogue.Aux Niçois qui mal y pensent is part of a series of eight short films entitled A propos de Nice, la suite, in which Raymond Depardon, Pavel Loungine, Claire Denis, Costa Gravas, Raoul Ruiz and Parviz Kimiavi also took part. The film by Catherine Breillat is most successful in showing the last convulsions of a society that – to quote Vigo – ‘lets itself go so much it makes you feel sick’. Without a screenplay, without extra research in advance and without beating about the bush, the camera captures and records what it’s not allowed to see or hear.Catherine Breillat: ‘You make a documentary on the basis of chance and luck. If you say “let the camera roam, then you just put the camera down. Because the first thing that has to roam is your own gaze. Once the subject has been chosen – in this case Nice and the rise of intolerance – then it comes down to tracking that down. That has always been my method, as scriptwriter and film-maker.’ (J.D.)
