La petite Lili (2003)

User Rating:

6.3/10   

Director:

Claude Miller

Writers:

Julien Boivent (writer)
Anton Chekhov (play)
(more)

Release Date:

27 August 2003 (France)

Genre:

Drama

Plot Keywords:

Kissing | Female Frontal Nudity | Female Nudity | Passion | Nude In Nature

Awards:

3 wins & 3 nominations

Cast

Nicole Garcia	...	Mado Marceaux
Bernard Giraudeau	...	Brice
Jean-Pierre Marielle	...	Simon Marceaux
Ludivine Sagnier	...	Lili
Robinson Stévenin	...	Julien Marceaux
Julie Depardieu	...	Jeanne-Marie
Yves Jacques	...	Serge
Anne Le Ny	...	Léone
Marc Betton	...	Guy
Michel Piccoli	...	Actor Who Plays Simon
Maylie Del Piero
Mathieu Grondin	...	Julien-Acteur
Louise Boisvert	...	Actress Who Plays Léone
Mustapha Chadli
Fani Kolarova
Mehdi
Julie Glenn
Eric Navech
Samuel Amar
Marine Beurier-Orsini
Jean-Claude Cloarec
Charles Senard	...	Julien's Assistant (as Charles Sénard)
Lauriane Vincent
Charlotte Girard
Franck Séchan
Charles Lehmann
Yvan Maniosky
Frédérique Barraja
François Breniaux
Claude La Haye
Vania Peirani-Vignes
Septy Drame
Carine Jean-Marie
Marion Dusautoir
Christophe Mathioux
Emmanuel Quartino
P'tit Louis
Claude Antoniades
Lionel Bailly
Bruno Glasberg
Xavier Embry
Bruno Roza
Yann Tesson
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Eléonore Stern	...	La fétarde (uncredited)

Directed by
Claude Miller

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Julien Boivent		writer
Anton Chekhov		play "Chayka"
Claude Miller		writer

Produced by
Christine Gozlan	....	associate producer
Sylvestre Guarino	....	executive producer
Daniel Louis	....	co-producer: Canada
Annie Miller	....	producer
Denise Robert	....	co-producer: Canada

Cinematography by
Gérard de Battista

Film Editing by
Véronique Lange

Production Design by
Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko

Costume Design by
Christel Birot
Jacqueline Bouchard

Makeup Department
Véronique Boitout	....	key hair stylist
Lucía Bretones-Méndez	....	key makeup artist
Marie Luiset	....	makeup artist
John Nollet	....	hair stylist: Nicole Garcia

Production Management
Jean-François Abbate	....	unit manager
Samuel Amar	....	production manager
George Jardon	....	post-production supervisor: Canada (as Georges Jardon)
Frédéric Morin	....	assistant production manager
Sophie Moulin	....	unit manager trainee
Antoine Moussault	....	unit manager
Yann Tesson	....	assistant unit manager

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Denis Bergonhe	....	first assistant director
Ketal Guenin	....	first assistant director
Emmanuel Murat	....	trainee assistant director
Charles Senard	....	second assistant director

Art Department
Agnès Aubert	....	assistant art director
Francesco Avella	....	carpenter
Céline Barray	....	set dresser
Nicolas Barray	....	painter
Brigitte Baudet	....	sculptor
Christian Borger	....	carpenter
Denis Chaboissier	....	painter
Yves Chaudesaigues	....	carpenter
Jérôme Chrétien	....	carpenter
Jérome Clavier	....	head painter
François Decaux	....	first assistant decorator
Nicolas Decaux	....	carpenter
Paul Decaux	....	head carpenter
Alexandra De Chimay	....	assistant art director
Laurent Jarriau	....	props
Loïc Jolly	....	painter
Yves Maufrey	....	carpenter
Marlène Million	....	painter
Bernadette Saint Loubert	....	set dresser
Charles Schwacsina	....	second assistant decorator
Didier Tardivel	....	painter

Sound Department
Gregory Bolduc	....	assistant sound mixer: Canada (as Grégory Bolduc)
Jocelyn Caron	....	adr foley recordist
Martin Cazes	....	sound coordinator: Canada
Jérôme Décarie	....	foley artist: Canada
Nicolas Gagnon	....	assistant foley artist: Canada
Bernard Gariépy Strobl	....	sound re-recording mixer
Claude La Haye	....	sound recordist
Benoit Leduc	....	adr recording engineer: Canada
Alain Lévy	....	post-synchronization
Antoine Morin	....	sound editor: Canada
Guy Pelletier	....	dialogue editor: Canada
Francis Péloquin	....	boom operator
Hans Peter Strobl	....	sound re-recording mixer
Raymond Vermette	....	supervising sound editor

Visual Effects by
Luc Augereau	....	visual effects producer
Laurent Desbrueres	....	digital color grader
Justine Gasquet	....	matte painter
François Vagnon	....	visual effects supervisor

Camera and Electrical Department
Claude Antoniades	....	electrician
Luis Armando Arteaga	....	first assistant camera
Lionel Bailly	....	electrician
Frédérique Barraja	....	still photographer
Simon Blanchard	....	second assistant camera
Stéphane Degniau	....	first assistant camera (as Stéphane Degnieau)
Xavier Embry	....	best boy grip
Xavier Embry	....	grip
Bruno Glasberg	....	electrician
Dominique Legueux	....	key grip
Nathan Miller	....	camera operator
Pascal Pajaud	....	gaffer
Jean-Baptiste Perrin	....	electrician
Bruno Roza	....	grip
Grégoire Tomat	....	camera trainee

Casting Department
Célina Blanc	....	casting: children
Carine Jean-Marie	....	casting: children

Costume and Wardrobe Department
Anne Bastien	....	costumer

Editorial Department
Aline Conan	....	color timer
Mathieu L. Denis	....	assistant editor: Canada
Pascale Dubé	....	post-production coordinator: Canada
Melanie Gauthier	....	post-production coordinator: Canada
Sylvie Lambert	....	post-production administrator
Natacha Louis	....	color timer
Bruno Patin	....	color timer

Other crew
Valerie Arbib	....	production secretary (as Valérie Arbib)
Emilie Barbault	....	assistant script supervisor
Laure Darie	....	production secretary
Françoise Della Libera	....	administrator
Michel Flaesch	....	animal trainer
François Guerrar	....	press attache
Sylvie Koechlin	....	script supervisor
Guillaume Lips	....	digital grader
James Mammeri	....	assistant administrator
Pierre Reyssat	....	production assistant
Stéphane Talagrand	....	location scout
Hélène Vietti	....	production assistant

Production Companies

• Cinémaginaire Inc.
• France 3 Cinéma
• Les Films Alain Sarde
• Les Films de la Boissière
• Production Lili Inc.

Distributors

• First Run Features (2004) (USA) (theatrical) (subtitled)
• Maison Descartes (2003) (Netherlands) (theatrical)
• esse&bi cinematografica distribuzione (2004) (Italy) (theatrical)
• Arte (2008) (France) (TV)
• Pyramide Distribution
• SBP (2004) (Argentina) (DVD)
• SBP (2004) (Argentina) (VHS)
• Transformer (2005) (Japan) (DVD)

Special Effects

• L'Etude et la Supervision des Trucages (L'E.S.T.) (visual effects)

Other Companies

• Bogard  camera equipment
• Car Grip  grip and lighting equipment
• Marko Audio Post-Production  re-recording facilities
• Menstreet Service  production services
• Modulations  sound editing
• Transpalux  electrical equipment
• Vision Globale  color grading

Also Known As:

Little Lili (International: English title)

Runtime:

France:104 min | Japan:89 min | Argentina:102 min | USA:104 min

Country:

France | Canada

Language:

French

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR

Certification:

Argentina:13 | Australia:M | Brazil:14 | Italy:T | Philippines:R-18 | South Korea:18 | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud)

Filming Locations:

Île-aux-Moines, Morbihan, France

Company:

Cinémaginaire Inc.

Movie Connections:

References Les enfants du paradis (1945)

Proust's Way

The most annoying thing about french movies about cinema is certainly their need for self-criticism. By doing so, they think they can hide themselves from any other criticism. It's exactly like when someone tells you - with an ironic intonation - all his major flaws, only in order to be contradict. But showing your flaws is not suppressing them.

And so it goes with Claude Miller's "La Petite Lili". This movie is a naturalist drama, where you can only watch "actors playing their parts", and who speak by "mots d'auteurs", trying to reach by them a certain "psychological truth". Furthermore, there're indeed an impression of constant semi-failure in all the scene of the movie, even in the one where a character says so. And, once again, it is not because all this is underlines by the movie itself that it's not true.

But the movie seems better than that and manage to get over all the clichés of a certain french "cinema d'auteur" -with the DV in bonus. Maybe because Proust's shadow, more than Tcheckov, seems to be everywhere in the movie. The writer is directly quote twice in the movie. The firth evocation - more of an invocation by the way - is made by Brice, the conventional director, who, in order to seduce the "jeune fille en fleur" Lili, quotes "Les plaisirs et les jours", where he found "something beautiful about the desire's angst". This sentence, of course, perfectly fits with the preoccupation of Lili, tortured double of Anne Baxter in Mankiewiictz's "All about Eve". Later on, Simon - the great Jean-Pierre Marielle - looking for something to argue with his doctor he can't stand, says to him that his illness comes from intelligence, and therefore, he needs an intelligent doctor to cure him. This sentence is a reminiscence of what's Marcel told to the Doctor Cottar in "In search of lost time". Of course, for it's hard to establish one and only direction for the movie, you can reproach to Miller to use as many cultural references as possible - Tchekhov, Proust, Mankiewicz - in order to satisfied his intellectual spectators. However, the Proust's way goes beyond Lili's "Desire's angst", and of all the characters, and gives birth to strange scenes in the second part of the movie, where the events of the first one, like in Proust's, are lived a second time by memory and artistic creation. It even reminds me of Eustache and the shooting of "La Maman et la putain".Everyone tries to transcend his own flaws, his pitiful routine, his ridiculous past and present to transform them in artistic energy - and especially Lili.

Meanwhile, Simon meets Michel Piccoli, his fictional double - another proustian theme - and strangely walks in a foreign and familiarly stage, the artistic copy of his holiday's house. You can then interprets the movie as an old man's dream, the search of lost time of a man who never lives anything, but who sees himself as an artist through his son. Because it's also in their memories that the characters walks in this second part. They live their life once again, but changed by art, which makes them unrecognizable, and certainly more true than the little family drama they lived four years ago. The movie becomes really good in this repetition, which almost belong to the fantastic, because, as in Proust's, art gives birth to a memory which is more real than art, and life becomes then its own ghost.