Diane Kurys

Personal life

Like many of her film's characters, Kurys had a difficult relationship with her parents, and her traumatic childhood became a subject in many of her films. She lived with her mother after their divorce in 1954, at one point running away to join her father at age sixteen. In her adolescence, she was radicalized in the spirit of May of '68, but became somewhat disillusioned in the aftermath, calling it a "revolution bourgeois" in an interview with Jean-Luc Wachthausen She first met her partner and fellow filmmaker Alexandre Arcady, when she was fifteen years old. They have been a couple since the 1960s, have two production companies together as well as a son born in 1991, Yasha, an author who writes under the name of Sacha Sperling fr.

Acting career

She began as an actress with Jean-Louis Barrault's company. She acted in theater, film, and television for eight years, but felt unable to express herself under "the director or any kind of authority or control." This led to her transitioning into writing and film making.

Film directing

With a government grant, she made her first film as director, Diabolo menthe (1977) (aka Peppermint Soda), which explored her life as a child of divorced parents, and focused on her relationship with her sister, to whom she dedicated the movie. Cocktail Molotov (1980) was her next film. In Coup de Foudre (1983) (a.k.a. Entre Nous), the divorce issue is revisited, with Isabelle Huppert playing the heroine's mother.

Kurys made her first English-language film, A Man in Love, in 1987 starring Peter Coyote and Greta Scacchi. At the film's conclusion, Scacchi's character gives up acting to become a writer; echoing Kurys's own transition in life.

C'est la vie (a.k.a. La Baule-les-Pins) (1990) returned to her alter-ego leading character's adolescent years. Huppert also appeared in Après l'amour (1992) (aka Love After Love). À la folie (aka Six Days, Six Nights) (1994) examined the relationship between two adult sisters. She also directed the period film Children of the Century which (1999) and the 2008 biopic about Françoise Sagan called Sagan. Her latest film is Pour une femme, released in 2013, which stars Benoît Magimel, Mélanie Thierry and Nicolas Duvauchelle.

Critical reception

Although Kurys' work as a filmmaker in the 1980s helped bring women's filmmaking into the mainstream of its time, her commercial successes have played a part in keeping her from being granted auteur status by many critics. Her harsher critics have called her films conventional, polished, and not challenging to cinema's status quo. In addition, her ambivalence toward feminism and dislike of the "woman director" or "women's cinema" label has played a part in her lack of feminist film study scholarship. In a section on Kurys for French Film: texts and contexts and the first book-length study of Kurys work, film scholar Carrie Tarr argues that her work is firmly within the auteurist tradition, "a coherent body of work with a recognizable style". Kurys' use of her own life story, her inclusion of a stand-in for herself in most films, the recurring character types and situations from her memories and concerns in her present, all create a body of work specifically centered on a unique female voice. Tarr theorizes that Kurys' signature contains two voices, one which reflect her rebellion against the male-centric world she meant to escape by turning from acting to filmmaking, and the other which collaborates with the patriarchal structure she still must operate within to be successful.

Production companies

The first, Alexandre Films was formed in 1977 with Alexandre Arcady prior to the release of Peppermint Soda. The company co-produced her first six films, as well as a number of Arcady's, whose name it bears. The pair formed a second company, New Light Films, in 1994, which produces films in both French and English.

Literature