HCAF ’24: Bertrand Dezoteux on Harmonie

Hyperreal Film Journal got a chance to watch the international premiere of Bertrand Dezoteux’s post-modern artistic feature, Harmonie, at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival 2024. Dezoteux was the writer-director but also led the CGI development. Join us as we touch on how his project evolved, his challenges, his diverse artistic inspirations, and possible avenues for unpacking Harmonie.

The story follows Jesus Perez, a human visiting the beautiful, mysterious world of Harmonie, where the mountains are the colors of the rainbow and the inhabitants share shapes he has never seen. Along the way, we witness a collage of references and interpretations come together, inspired by film, television, painting, architecture, and literature.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Thank you for sitting down with me, Bertrand. I'm very curious—what was the initial vision that seeded Harmonie?

This project started in 2018 with a short movie, because I started making CGI animation when I left school in 2008 and I was doing short films. At this time, I wanted to make something more narrative. Then the project was mostly experimental, in the field of fine arts or contemporary art. I was reading science fiction as well—Dan Simmons, Ursula Le Guin. So I was inspired by literature, and also several lectures and sci-fi movies to create my own world. The idea was to build a world with its own inhabitants, and with a human coming and discovering this world and struggling to understand its rules. 
The idea was that this world maybe reflects a sort of digital logic. That's why the characters only say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ It's a very binary way to communicate. So at this time, there was this movie, Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve, about trying to communicate with another species. I found it funny that at the beginning of Harmonie, we learn that the aliens understand French, so the specific problem in Arrival is immediately solved. I also found some of its visual aspects funny. I thought, if we had to send someone to represent the Earth to another planet, this person should be very famous. So I had different options and chose to send a normal guy named Jesus Perez, but also connected to something bigger, like God or the sky. 
I found this picture of Christ, and that's why the movie is maybe the adventure of this picture. At the beginning, it was a painting, and then it became a 3D model, and then it was about how these 3D models interact. These models are also archetypal. I heard the architect Christian de Portzamparc explain that Western architecture was haunted by the proportions of the cross of Christ, particularly in the proportion of the windows. So his body is supposed to be a canon, a standard by which the world is measured, and my film exposes this model to a different type of anatomy, namely the inhabitants of Harmonie.

You mentioned Arrival as a cinematic reference point, which we’ve already touched on. In the Houston Cinema Arts Festival brochure, you also mentioned Fantastic Planet (1973) and Freak Orlando (1981). Can you talk about the influence of these latter two films on your own?

Yes, (Roland) Topor, one of the writers for Fantastic Planet, has been quite a big influence. My work is even represented by the same gallery as Topor. When I was a child, there was a TV show that was designed by Topor called Téléchat (1982-1986), which means ‘Tele-cat.’ There was a kind of weird cat who had a phone, and the phone was a character. I like the idea that devices or machines or objects can become characters and can be alive like the Middle Age design for the faces. For me, working with CGI reminds me of a world like in the Pixar movies. It's a CGI world. It’s a world of robots. So as a creator or spectator, I like creating a window into a world that is all automatized. And maybe that reflects Fantastic Planet, too, the robots as well as its surrealism.

I also noticed there's this wonderful clarity in your story, despite the abundance of visual elements. Your characters are only ever doing one thing at a time, and it really helps the viewer to kind of see what's happening so they can engage with the story and unpack it. That reminds me of Robert Bresson. Was that intentional? What was the influence of Bresson on your work? 

Yeah, that's very true. I discovered Robert Bresson when I was a teenager through the film Pickpocket (1959). In the beginning, Bresson was a very important reference for the acting in Harmonie. There are also some very, very distant connections because maybe Bresson could be seen as a kind of animator. I was interested in his method, because he always worked with amateurs, to the extent that, for him, when somebody saw themself in one of his films, their career with Bresson was over. He couldn't work with them anymore. And he had another rule that he didn’t speak about actors, but about models. A model is typically the word we use in CGI, also, and his model directing was based on the principle of a score. He told his actors to walk three steps, to look at the mug, and to blink two times, and then to look at the door. It was very choreographical, like dance, and very scripted. I was very influenced by this approach to writing and animating the scenes.
In addition to Bresson, there was also my sense of humor in taking this Christ-like character but giving him very low charisma. I worked with a friend who did the voice of the character to find the right intonation. It was based on the Russian dubbing of movies, because in the Russian dubbing, there are only two actors, and those two actors perform all the roles, and they do it in a very constant and flat way. And I found it quite funny and interesting too, and very focused.

Not only were you the director of the film, but you also did the CGI as well. What was the most challenging part of production?

CGI took a long time. I sometimes had trainees to help me, but I had to improve my skills as the project progressed. That's why, in an early version of the film, the end was perhaps more sophisticated than the beginning. I redid the beginning of the film after finishing this first version so that the final version of the film has more unity. 
Sound was quite difficult in the end, as I had to post-produce the film with industry technicians, who are not used to artists' films and have high rates, due to the French administrative system that doubles costs. In terms of directing, the most challenging part was coordinating the natural, musical, and gestural dimensions of the scenes, the spatial movements of the characters, and their interactions. As it happens, the characters sometimes have to make long journeys, and they don't always arrive where I want them to! My previous projects weren't as complex.

The premise of the film is that Harmonie is a planet where any species of organism can reproduce with another, which is such a wonderful way to set up the way you play with forms, play with structure. It seems like that's something you do a lot in the movie. I'm wondering—what is your relationship with structuralism and postmodern art?

Yes, I consider my work as a part of the post-modern movement because of two things. 
The first one is the idea of a collage, to make things emerge by collage with different references, which appears a lot in the movie. Maybe it's just a way to present some references and to comment on them. And this aspect of commentary is related to post-modernism also. So the movie, by creating a world and narrative, the idea was that the movie can be shown to more people. Because you don't have to know specific references to understand the situations. But at the same time, it's a way to show things that come from a more avant-garde context, you know? So it's a way to make people listen to like experimental music and watch something which comes from contemporary art, but in film, through which can anybody can understand.

Using deconstruction as a tool for accessibility.

Yes.

SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW

You've got this character, Jesus Perez, who looks exactly like Jesus Christ. He dies and is resurrected, then there's all these different parallels with the Christ story. There are also subversions. Can you talk a little bit about the parallels with the Jesus Christ narrative, and also the subversions?

Yeah, it's a very good question. Jesus Perez is a guy I met when I was a kid. He was a kitchen designer and and he had this long hair. He was the first person I met in my life who was called Jesus. So the idea then was that we should send someone to another planet, as an ambassador, who is half human, half god. It’s not Jesus Christ, it's Jesus Perez. So he’s a person, but I was wondering to myself, if I was called ‘Jesus,’ maybe I would be influenced by Jesus Christ. And maybe my look would be influenced by his. 

At the beginning, maybe the character has a specific presence. Maybe he's like a colonialist. Maybe has a mix between good intentions and then maybe naive intentions. He questions the inhabitants of Harmonie, but his questions are not trying to know them. He's just trying to verify how they are different or the same. That's why he asks them if they have health insurance and other specific questions. And then the end of the first part, before he dies, maybe it’s like the episode from The Twilight Zone (1959), where the characters are brought to a planet where they are put in a typical American house, like a suburban house, but they cannot escape from it. The windows open and the inhabitants of the planet look at them. And in fact, they are in a zoo, it's a zoo.

His resurrection was a joke, but also a way of thinking about what it implies for a character. Because when you resurrect, I don't know if you can say you're the same as before. Something has changed, and that's when the character perhaps becomes more realistic, psychologically speaking. He becomes violent with his dog. He can be authoritarian and arrogant, as he claims rationality for himself in this universe. He also has weaknesses, so maybe he's more human, and maybe he's also sick. But he's both sick and a doctor because he can cure sinusitis and conjunctivitis. I found it interesting that he's both sick and a doctor. 

I thought it would be interesting to mark out these trivial, almost trivial issues, in contrast to the expectations of the wonder of a fantasy or science-fiction story.

The end of the film becomes a bit of a tragedy, similar to the life of Jesus, but instead of killing him, they strand him on Harmonie. Harmonie is this gorgeous world where people sing instead of talk, the mountains have these layers of colors. Does it say something that being stranded on such a beautiful planet feels like a tragedy?

Maybe there are several interpretations. Maybe we don't know what Harmonie is at the end. Maybe it looks like a paradise because it's related to this painting by Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1510). The Master, a character in the story, when he gets better, he escapes from Harmonie. So maybe everyone wants to escape from Harmonie, I don't know, but it can be an answer. 

And then I don't know what it means, maybe the character is unfit for life. His relationship with that world is that of a tourist, who comes to check if the places and people he encounters conform to his own representations. Sometimes this works, as in his relationship with his pet, but the world in which he fails remains hermetically sealed. In a sequel, I imagine the character evolving—gaining access to knowledge, and perhaps to a deeper sense of beauty. 

On a more metaphysical level, the tragic aspect and the character's failures are a metaphor for a digital world organized by rigid and implacable procedures and rules, in which we have to learn to navigate. And despite the apparent freedom of movement on this planet, the computerized framework that makes it up narrows the field of possibilities.

Also, he has this tail, which is the same as Carniluv’s tail, his pet. It’s a secret, because when they are in the panopticon, you know, they swim and the planet is one where all the species can mix together. Maybe it’s a moment when the DNA of Carniluv can mix with his. And so the idea was that like in the novel Hyperion (1989) by Dan Simmons, there are these people who die and resurrect again and again, and then they become these little characters with no hair and similar features eventually. I had the idea that maybe we can find out how they became this way but through the experience of someone who lives there, not just through the experience of an explorer visiting for a short time. So this could maybe open into a story that illustrates his situation in a way that is more rich.

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