Marie-Josée Croze at the Montreal World Film Festival on Friday, Aug. 28, 2009. Photograph by: Marie-France Coallier, The Gazette
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By Jeff Heinrich - MONTREAL – Slipping into her hometown last week to promote a movie – one of four she made over the past year from her base in France – Marie-Josée Croze got touchy about thinly veiled questions about her loyalty to Quebec.
“I’m a humanist,” the 39-year-old actress said Friday before the gala world premiere Korkoro (Liberté), director Tony Gatlif’s latest picture about his stateless people, the Roma gypsies of Europe.
“There’s something about nationalism that exasperates me, that bores me sh..less, that pisses me off – borders, I think we have to do away with them,” said Croze, who plays a schoolteacher in wartime Vichy France who makes false passports for the Resistance.
“The world is small, we’re all human, we’re all the same. Problems don’t exist for just one nation – they exist for all human beings. I detest nationalism, just detest it.”
The Quebec variety, too? Croze stares through the bangs of her bleached blonde hair and her eyes narrow as she considers the question.
It obviously grates. Croze left Quebec six years ago after winning the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as a junkie in Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions. Ever since, she’s had to justify herself to the francophone media here.
The morning of our interview, a lead article in the Journal de Montréal remarked on Croze’s pitch-perfect Parisian accent, “which upsets some people,” according to the tabloid – an issue Croze calls ridiculous.
“I have a big problem with people saying ‘You left Quebec,’” she told me in our half- hour together at the Hyatt hotel.
“I’m a human being, that’s all, with roots in Canada, in Quebec. One day, I said I was Canadian and someone told me ‘No, you’re Québécoise,’ and I replied ‘Too bad for you – I’m Acadian,’” said Croze, referring to her ancestry.
“It happens a lot. I’m not political, but I can say one thing: nationalism means closing yourself off from something.
“Our ‘friend’ Adolf (Hitler) believed he was part of a pure race that was better than any other, and that allowed him to treat others like he did – the Jews, the Roma, the French, the English, the Poles, everybody. It’s disgusting, this idea that you’re superior to others.”
That’s a big reason why she did Korkoro. Based on real events, the movie is about how a family of travelling gypsies who come to a village in central France to work the grape harvest and how the their lives are interrupted by the Holocaust. The collaborationist police of Vichy France round them up under the gaze of their Nazi overlords.
Living in France and knowing the history, Croze deplores “the opportunism of the French who used the Nazis as an alibi to get rid of people they themselves didn’t like – in this case, the gypsies.”
She hopes the movie will prompt an awakening in France to that sordid history, as well as remind people that there were some courageous French men and women during that period, too – like the real-life woman her character is based on, who helped save Jews and parachuted British airman from capture.
As an actress, she also was living a dream by working with Gatlif, a director she says all French actress are dying to play for. “His spirit is very punk, very crazy – with him, you’re going on a trip, not some bourgeois cinema adventure,” Croze said.
“On his sets, its very communistic – all the actors are on the same level, there are no stars.”
What did Gatlif see in her?
“Her look,” the director replied in a separate interview. “Her character is a bit Hitchcockian – a woman who’s reserved, because there’s some kind of fear behind the facade, and fragile, but with nerves of steel and an intelligence of steel.
“I only knew Marie-Josée a little but she was the only actress I auditioned for this part, and when I saw her I knew right away that she was the character. I looked at her wrists, I looked at her waist, I looked at how thin she was, her neck – and all of that matched the physique of the 1940s.”
Though respected as an actress in France, Croze shuns publicity, and that helped, too, Gatlif said.
“She’s done a lot of films, but she’s not like all the other actresses in France. She isn’t always on TV or on radio; she’s too busy working. Marie-Josée is someone who’s precious in the cinema, I can assure you. She’s very much an actress.”
True to her anti-star persona, Croze cultivates a defiantly quirky look. In Montreal the day of the premiere, she wore a pair of shiny white loafers “in honour of Michael Jackson.” She said she bought them two weeks before in Rome for 20 Euros, “out of the window of a clothing shop for old ladies.”
She travels with almost no change of clothes, but a suitcase full of shoes. They’re almost all the ones she has in Paris. She needs to be ready for any mood or occasion.
Her only concession to big-label fashion? The stylish little grey purse she carries everywhere that was a gift from Chanel – “because they’re my friends.”
In France, Croze has distanced herself from Quebec by staying busy – much busier that she was as a young actress here.
In the last 12 months, she has had lead roles in four films: Je l’aimais (with Daniel Auteuil, coming out in November), Korkoro (opening Dec. 2 in France), La cuisine (with Catherine Deneuve, due out in October in Paris) and Nicole Garcia’s thriller Un balcon sur la mer (with Jean Dujardin, to be released next year).
“I’m having trouble crystallizing my energies right now – I think I need to stop for a little while,” said the globetrotting Croze, who before coming to Montreal had spent a few days promoting Je l’aimais in Zurich, a city she hates (“the devil hides behind the money there”). After Montreal, she was headed to London, a city she’s more at home in.
Never stop working: it’s been Croze’s mantra and since leaving Quebec, it’s paid off.
“There are always so many choices,” she said. “Play a role on stage, be in a film, even initiate my own projects – I can do what I want now.
“And that freedom is fleeting – you have to take it seriously. But I don’t like serious things! Right now I’m a bit like the bunny in the headlights. I’m waiting for some irresistible desire to do something.”
Just don’t expect it to be in Quebec.
“I’ve been living in Paris for six years now,” she said. “People think I left here because I was unhappy, but that’s not it. I just had no work. I wasn’t what the bigwigs in Quebec cinema wanted; I didn’t get hired, so I didn’t work.”
She finds it hypocritical that producers here are keen to have her in their films, now that she’s a star.
“Imagine that people detest you, and one day you win the lottery and become a millionaire, and those same people who so despised you and shunned you turn around and try to glorify you, say they’re ready spend their entire day with you – how would you feel?” she said.
“You’d want to tell them to go f--- themselves. You’d go find other friends.”
Is she really that bitter? Croze backed off a bit.
“It’s not that people went out of their way to hurt me. It’s just that I worked so very little. I made some very beautiful films – (Denis Villeneuve’s) Maelström, (Atom Egoyan’s) Ararat – and each time they’d play at festivals and win prizes and I’d win prizes. I was proud of it and still am.
“But let’s face it, I only did one film every three years, and the rest of the time I wasn’t called once to audition for anything else.
“After I won my prize at Cannes, for sure, if I’d stayed in Quebec I would have had offers. But if they didn’t want me before, why would they say they want me now? It’s too late now. I’ve gone elsewhere – not out of vengeance, but simply out of a desire to believe in humanity.
“Because it’s too ugly to see the same people who wouldn’t look at you before look at you now because you have success and money and power and a statuette from Cannes.”
What’s changed the most since Cannes?
“My entire life changed. Before, I was someone who aspired to be an actor but who couldn’t become one, because you don’t become an actor if you’re only in a film every three years, you’re only an apprentice actor, someone who from time to time is an actor.
“An actor without work is not an actor. You can’t play a role in your kitchen. You need a script, a role, a director, a camera, an audience.
“Now I’m an actor every day – every day. In Montreal, I had my life – walk my dog, laugh with my friends, smoke a joint, go for a walk on the mountain, do some cycling – that was 95 per cent of my time. Now it’s the opposite: I only have my métier, I have a tiny five per cent for my own life.”
What does she do with the five per cent?
“I’m very solitary. I don’t like to be surrounded by too many people. When I’m not working, sometimes I just need to be alone. I can spend two or three days at home without going out. I take my dog out for a walk, and that’s it. I make meals for myself, I watch TV,
I read a lot of books.”
So far, she doesn’t have to worry about being accosted by fans in the streets of Paris. The city’s too cool for that. Besides, she keeps her head down when she goes out, staring at her shoes; that’s just the way she walks.
“You shouldn’t lose contact with the world, you shouldn’t be afraid of living in view of other people, shouldn’t be too scared to go eat in a restaurant alone. If you’re too scared of being recognized, it prevents you from doing a lot of things.”
For example?
“Well, I walk my dog at night in my pyjamas, sometimes at one o’clock in the morning, after we’ve finished watching a film or TV or that I’ve been on the phone with someone. We go for a romp, and I’m in my pyjamas. I go down four flights to the street with my dog, in my pajama bottoms with a coat thrown over me and some bizarre shoes on my feet.”
In Paris, that’s how a star comports herself. It’s Croze’s way of dealing with fame.
“The day I tell myself I’m too well-known to go out in my pyjamas, that’s the day I throw myself out the window.”
jheinrich@thegazette.canwest.com
Korkoro (Liberté), the critically acclaimed new film directed by Tony Gatlif and starring Marie-Josée Croze and Marc Lavoine, has finished its regular festival run here. But look for it to be re-screened Monday, the festival’s last day; it might be selected for one of the “suggestions from the public” slots open to the festival’s most popular films.