By Patricia Ochs
Paris, January 14: Arthur Joffé is frustrated. The director is scrambling to resurrect his latest film Que La Lumiere Soit (Let There Be Light) from the maddening blackout that greeted its release in July. After years of work, this delightful and imaginative comedy was dumped swiftly and unceremoniously into a few Paris movie theaters by its production company, CiBy 2000, which was going bankrupt. On top of that, it opened on the day of the World Cup semi finals.
It was meant to be a film for Christmas, Joffé said of his movie, which is chock full of Jewish humor and witty asides on creativity and mortality. Joffé, who won a Palme d'Or at Cannes for short films, told The Tocqueville Connection that despite the universally enthusiastic reviews, the film fizzled with the ill timed release.
Que La Lumiere Soit opens with God (voiced by Pierre Arditi) hovering over a television in a rundown room. Rankled by the violence, He destroys the TV, summons up a manual typewriter with Hebrew keys and writes his own script, a film for humanity. After numerous frustrated attempts, the floor is covered with wadded up papers. The Lord's chief angel, Rene (Ticky Holgado), appears to fan the winter fire with creaky wings and urges the cranky Almighty to descend with his completed work to Hollywood, the City of Angels.
Hurtled to earth on an asteroid equipped with an armchair, God lands. Hollywood is a bust. No one can see God in Los Angeles. He and Rene decide on Paris, where he finds his director, a modern day Joan of Arc named Jeanne (Helene de Fougerolles). To persuade his director, God must communicate by temporarily taking over the bodies of a range of characters, including Jeanne's wacky cleaning lady, a cat, and a scruffy city pigeon. We know Him by a recurring nervous facial tick. God wins Jeanne over but it isn't easy. Her film comes to fruition in a screening at Notre Dame Cathedral. "It's a form of homage, a love letter, a tribute to the creative spirit," said Joffé. "It's like a Chagall painting, it's a little surreal but it has a spirit you don't normally find in French films."
Joffé, whose father was Russian and mother Spanish, grew up in Paris. Multilingual, he has directed films in Italian, French and English, and is clearly in a genre all his own. He came up with the idea for his current film five years ago. I was joking with myself about my own impatience and about the huge pretensions we all have to create life on a screen out of nowhere. Sometimes we think we are gods.
But he also drew a connection between spirituality and the cinema. You're in the dark looking up at the light like in a church. People are together reflecting. That's why it must be the profoundest disappointment and irony to Joffé to have the lights go out on his own theater. He's working on buying the rights to the film in an effort to revive it.