Interview with Julien Poupard, AFC, about “Langue étrangère”, by Claire Burger

Fanny, a shy and lonely teenager, goes on a language exchange to Germany. In Leipzig, she meets her pen pal, Lena, a teenager with a burning desire to become politically involved. Fanny is troubled. To seduce Lena, she invents a life of her own, even trapping herself in her own lies.

Intimately blending fiction and documentary, Claire Burger this time tackles a film in two parts, with a resolutely chiselled writing style, performed for the most part by a cast of seasoned actors. Julien Poupard explains the genesis of the project : “On each film with Claire, there’s the anxiety of reproducing what we’ve already done on the previous one, so we set ourselves challenges of sorts, like a game, to experiment with other cinematographic forms.”
The originality of Langue étrangère lies in its change of point of view in the middle of the film, suddenly shifting from the point of view of Fanny’s character to that of Léna as we move from Germany to France.

During prep, Julien Poupard and Claire Burger initiated a sort of ping-pong match of images to arrive at the film’s artistic direction. “Claire didn’t want a postmodern image, in other words, no homage to film, grain or any other current idea of the photographic past. On the contrary, for this film she wanted to anchor this story between two young girls in the contemporary, and together find an image that could evoke the present, even the future in a way, an aesthetic that wouldn’t yet exist...”.

Among the most important photographic influences was Smith, discovered in 2021 at Rencontres d’Arles : “Fascinating, ghostly images with very detached blacks, and a very low color gamut, with very little contrast.
We also mentioned the Italian photographer Paulo Raeli, who captures youth in motion.

With Yov Moor, the colorist in prep, we developed a LUT based on these principles, with a real dominance of pinks and cyans in the image, and then very lifted blacks. It was on this basis that I built the film’s image in the first few weeks of shooting, applying Resolve myself every evening.”

Asked about this particular dual skill set, Julien Poupard immediately replies : “If I’d had the budget, I’d probably have called in a DIT. But that wasn’t an option at all... And since color-grading rushes is absolutely non-negotiable for me, I’ve learned to do it myself ! So, at the end of the day, in a sort of mini-lab that I had set up in my hotel room, I could show Claire a few images to validate the image directions from the first week of shooting.”
Shot over a 40-day period, Langue étrangère began in Germany, with all the typical exteriors and interiors that make up the film’s opening. “About a third of the film was shot in Germany, and two-thirds in France for budgetary reasons. Claire chose Leipzig for its political dimension. Leipzig is a mecca for the alternative left and the ecological struggle, sometimes referred to as the New Berlin. So it’s an East German aesthetic, with tags all over the city - sexy Germany ! And Strasbourg, because it’s the city of Europe par excellence. With the European Parliament, the heart of Europe.
During the shoot, it was fascinating to note the cultural and social differences between the two sides of the Rhine, and in particular the obvious maturity of young Germans at high school compared to their French counterparts. The sequence of the live Skype dialogue between the two language classes shows this clearly in the film, absolutely without artifice !

Claire also wanted a Franco-German mix for the shoot. So I had a German gaffer, Daniel Pauselius, with whom I got on very well. He introduced me to projectors that don’t exist in France : Pipes Lighting. These are tube-shaped spotlights of various sizes that can be easily hung from the ceiling. It was a great discovery, and a way for me to put into practice the theme of Franco-German exchange which is at the heart of the film !

“Claire wanted the film to be in motion : the means of transport (train, bicycle), the movement of water, of languages... A movement, a kind of fluidity. Claire and I were used to shooting handheld on previous projects. This time, we wanted to try the Steadicam, to bring that fluidity. For the bike sequences and the party, we used the Stead a lot, orchestrated by Marion Gaillard.
And even the dolly and zoom for the family meal with Léna’s grandfather and grandmother. Claire and I know each other well, and there’s a lot of trust between us. And that sometimes allows us to take the other person by the hand and get them to take a step to the side. It’s a way of taking the other person to a place in the cinema where they’re not necessarily expecting to be. I think that’s also why the relationship between us endures, because we never get bored !”
Among other challenges, Julien Poupard remembers working on the iridescence found in several of the film’s sequences. “This idea started in prep with a simple photo of a puddle of petrol in which the light reflected and diffracted like a rainbow... After doing a lot of research into this effect, I developed a color-grading process that allowed me to select the highlights in a very homemade way and inject a rainbow color image. 1 _ 

This effect is particularly evident in the last German sequence, at night in the garden of the house where Léna meets Fanny in the Jacuzzi. It’s an effect that can evoke dreams or fantasies, and it’s combined with a light that’s much more whimsical than in the rest of the film. The backlighting is very strong, iridescent, highlighting the reflections of the water and the steam escaping from the spa, the aim being to make this dream as erotic as possible...”.

Another key sequence in the film is the party with the young drug dealer, which again ends outside at night, in a highly sensual threesome. “In this scene, we really wanted to light the bodies very head-on, as if a lighting torch had been placed on the camera. The light decreases very quickly in depth, and we get a very intimate, yet brightly-lit look that blends with the deliberately dirty movements of the Steadicam. A deliberately “voyeuristic” image, like a photographic flash, an intrusive camera. It’s a scene of mystery, and this relationship to drugs is evoked by the flickering of the highlights that we calibrated with Magali Leonard.

Asked about his choice of equipment for this film, Julien Poupard confides : “In digital, I find that the possibilities of post-production tools are almost infinite. So I try to have a rich signal on camera when I shoot. That’s why, on this film, I insisted on using the Alexa 35, which obviously had a cost in relation to the modest budget we had. Thanks to the conditions negotiated with our rental company Vantage, I was able to combine it with the wide-aperture Vantage One series, as well as an Angénieux zoom for a few scenes. It’s also a good opportunity to say that, since the digital revolution, we’ve had to prepare our films more. Faced with an ocean of possibilities, you can quickly lose track of things and get lost photographically. When I think back to the ease with which calibrations were - and still are - done in the digital silver chain, it now seems necessary to know exactly where you’re going when you tackle a film like this. “1 _
Commenting on his special relationship with the director, who has already won several awards (Caméra d’or, César for Best Short Film...), Julien Poupard confides : “Claire (who graduated from the editing department of La Fémis in 2008) has also co-edited all her films. And I have to admit, she really impresses me on set. In her hunt for the image, Claire knows exactly where she’s going and what she needs after each take. She always gets it right...”