It is not hunger, love, anger or fear, the source of our ills, but our own nature. She is the one who engenders hunger, love, anger and fear, with this sentence Tolstoy closed his iconic tale The Origin of Evil. However, for the French director Sébastien Marnier, evil resides in lies, a maxim that He makes it very clear in his latest film, also titled The Origin of Evil, which arrives today, July 6, in theaters in Spain.
In a luxurious villa by the sea, a modest young woman finds a strange family: an unknown and very rich father, his capricious wife, his daughter, an ambitious businesswoman, a rebellious teenager and a disturbing servant. Someone is lying. Between suspicions and lies, the mystery sets in and the evil spreads… Márnier had always wanted to make thrillers. “It’s THE genre that made me want to make movies as a kid.” Within this genre is where he feels comfortable directing from his own personal obsessions to telling the story of the reality that surrounds him. “Through the thriller I can do this because it derealizes the world. Everything is more poetic and much less obvious, which makes it more interesting.”
Neither in this nor in his other two films, The Last Lesson and Irreproachable, there are good guys or bad guys, they are torturous and tortured characters, as moving as they are terrifying. “That is the most beautiful thing to write and the most pleasant thing to act because it is the most human: we all have a light side and a dark side within us that drives us to do extraordinary things.” He wants to believe that the human being is not destructive or monstrous by nature, but society that causes chaos. It is a theme that appears in all his creations: the characters are violently affected by social pressure, aging, the need for love , the need to exist, to find their place, etc.
Evil springs up in multiple fields, in the family, patriarchy, money, but the original evil comes from lies, for him “it is what unites all the families in the world, that is why they are so toxic.” It is also a resource that is very useful for him to make his characters evolve in the plot, since “my protagonists are declassed and, above all, class deserters, who discover a new hostile environment in which they have to find their place and inevitably play a role, this is clearly a metaphor for contemporary society. I myself had to play a role to enter the inhospitable world of French cinema: I had to erase my suburban accent, invent a speech and a character that wasn’t me. Social pressure, like that of social networks, pushes people to become actors in another life.”
In the film, he also recounts “a very personal moment in my mother’s history. One day, at the age of 60, she met her biological father; he was a banker in Poitiers, rather to the right of the political spectrum. They, for the On the contrary, they were a middle-class communist family” and this meeting shattered a series of principles of their parents. “It all started with a phone call between my mother and her father, with the same replies that are heard in the film.” When the protagonist of the film arrives at her new family, she lies. “She cannot assume her condition as a simple worker in a house where the question of money is omnipresent. Her salary is the price of the bottle that her father takes out of the cellar to celebrate her reunion, that’s why it’s a fable. In this house the bedrooms are upstairs but in the basement, the maid commits robberies, fights break out… it’s a bit like a place for the downtrodden.”
Regarding the question and the debate about social cinema, in which his films could well be included, for him it is impossible for a film not to contain a political component in it, it is something intrinsic, which is present from the moment one decides make a work, be it a film or another type of creation. For him, this act is always a little personal therapy, but above all, it is a sample of the director’s vision of the contemporary world. “The new wave of genre films coming to France is an exciting and highly stimulating response for the years to come. Today’s public needs points of view about reality”.
