When Adèle Haenel looks into a camera, her eyes are like rocks—wild and absolutely still. She looks at you, and you know in an instant that she is also reading you. By the time she appeared in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019, racing ferociously towards a cliffside, she had been making films for 17 years and her eyes were hard as a blunt accusation.
Five months after the movie premiered, she walked out of the César awards to protest Roman Polanski winning the best director prize. At the door, she shouted, “Bravo, pedophilia!” before vanishing from the industry. For four years, she didn’t shoot a movie. Then, last spring, she put her indictment into words. In a letter to the French cultural magazine Télérama, she announced she was done with the French film business—finished with its misogyny, its catatonic stories, the pretense of female empowerment. She said she was starting a new kind of life with the choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Now, the pair have come to New York with a new dance called L’Étang. It is a story of savage desire, a boy obsessed with his mother, or, as Vienne imagines it, the dominant and the dominated.
When Vienne calls me from a balcony in upstate New York, L’Étang is set to open at New York Live Arts in about a week’s time. Dogs bark in the background, and she occasionally glances over the railing in worry. “They sound like they’re crying,” she says. I suspect it’s only politeness that keeps her from racing down the stairs to check on them. From the way she speaks, I can tell she is a person who cannot ignore pain.
Vienne first met Haenel at a party, but before that, she got to know her through her movies. She liked them because they made her laugh, a feeling as important to her as love. She saw beauty in Haenel’s humor and also something else—a sense of timing and musicality. Haenel spoke with perfect rhythm. In a way, she was already dancing.
At the party, Vienne told Haenel about a play that she wanted to bring to France. It was written in a form of German barely anyone spoke outside of Switzerland, and by the time it was published, its author, Robert Walser, had died in an asylum. Vienne had just found a translation she could read, and the story obsessed her. It was about a boy who loves his mother too much and fakes his own suicide to see if she feels the same way. Beneath the words, Vienne saw emotions that no one in the play dared to articulate, and she started to imagine those feelings as movements.