Pater | |
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Film poster
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Directed by | Alain Cavalier |
Produced by | Michel Seydoux |
Starring | Alain Cavalier Vincent Lindon |
Release date
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Running time
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105 minutes |
Country | France |
Language | French |
Pater is a 2011 French drama film directed by Alain Cavalier. It premiered In Competition on 17 May at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Cavalier and Lindon play versions of themselves, starting work on a film in which they will play the president of the republic and a politician who will be prime minister, respectively.
Though improvised conversations, they sketch out both their fictional and actual relationships.
Cavalier's President character calls on Lindon's Prime Minister character to pass a law on the maximum salary at the national level. The project met with strong opposition and the two men can not muster a majority of MPs behind the project. Having the feeling of not being sufficiently supported by the President, Lindon decides to run for president himself.
Pater was shot with a handheld digital camera
Cavalier said "The year of working together changed us[...] I wasn’t in charge the way a director is in charge. And we discovered things gradually. I used to plan the last shot from the start, and thought about that from the beginning. I had studied Greek tragedy, . I was influenced by films like Renoir's Partie de campagne and John Huston's Asphalt Jungle. Now I want to forget all that."
The film was made with a skeleton script and cast. "I didn’t write one line of dialogue, just a sketch, nine pages, about how I met Vincent, and how we decided to work together, how I would film." Cavalier said the film is "about the intimacy of power and how it is like the intimacy of making a movie together, without a cast, without a classical team."
The New York Times described the film as "an improvised adventure, a game of Let’s Pretend with a political twist, with scenes of the two picnicking in the forest on a gourmet feast, plucking the proper ties and suits from vast closets, and talking of cabbages and kings, as it were — and of how they feel about women."