Le stade de Wimbledon

The fascination of a young French woman for the controversial intellectual Bobby Vohler, who died 15 years earlier, takes her to Trieste in Italy. There, with the aid of his former friends, she tries to reconstruct the man’s life. She is led by the question of why this editor, highly regarded in literary circles, never published his own work. The young woman scours libraries and secondhand shops, in search of information about the legend she created herself. Her quest takes her finally to Wimbledon in England, where she meets the woman who is supposed to have known Vohler best.Mathieu Amalric based Le stade de Wimbledon on a novel by Daniele del Giudice, in which chance plays an important role. Amalric worked directly from the book, without a script and without any preparation, with five actors he only involved in the film process late on. Three days before his departure for Trieste, he still didn’t have an idea of whom he was going to film. In doing so, he placed himself in the hands of fate, entirely in the spirit of the book. According to Amalric, the film is about denial and a fear of emptiness. Amalric: ‘If you come from an intellectual environment, you tend to ask yourself questions like: what is the point of making a film or of anything? I don’t want anything to do with demons like that and the book settles up with them in a pleasant way.’