Theatre, opera, cinema, Patrice Chéreau threw himself body and soul into three major arts as a director. Between memory and passion, this intimate portrait recounts the dazzling career of an artist whose creative power never faltered.
The son of painters who passed down their love for art to him, Patrice Chéreau was nineteen when he first started directing, revolutionising theatrical practice in the 1960s. With his indomitable energy, the enfant terrible grew fast, amused by his precocious success in front of television cameras and performing on Europe's most famous stages, from the Piccolo Teatro in Milan to the Théâtre National de Villeurbanne, with Roger Planchon. Soon, this workaholic would set the opera on fire, asked by Pierre Boulez to direct Der Ring des Nibelungen for the opera's one hundredth anniversary in Bayreuth, Wagner's sanctuary. He came back tirelessly to his obsession with the body, at times desired, hated, or abused, an obsession that ran through all his shows, from Shakespeare to Koltès and Genet. He who, as a young man, spent countless hours at the Cinémathèque and whose passion for expressionism greatly influenced his own style, would also invent his own cinema, with an intriguing first feature, La Chair de l'Orchidée (The Flesh of the Orchid). Then, from The Wounded Man to Intimacy, each of his works analysed human relationships with great sensitivity...
Stéphane Metge retraces Patrice Chéreau's effervescent career. A loving but uncompromising portrait of the artist at work, drawn with delicious lightness from a treasure trove of archival footage. Jeering, sometimes scathing, meticulous, and always completely present onstage and with his actors, Chéreau the impatient appears here irresistibly alive.
Production
Co-production ARTE France, Amip
