French filmmaker Éric Rohmer shot 27 films in his 50-year career, but what not everyone knows is that he also wrote a play called The Trio in E-flat (1988). Rita Azevedo, a prestigious Portuguese director, decided to adapt this work by Rohmer into a film with another film in it.
The trio in E flat narrates the meetings between Paul and Adélia, two former lovers played by Pierre Léon and Rita Durão, who meet regularly to philosophize about their past as a couple, chat about her new love affairs or discuss music. In Azevedo’s film adaptation, he is a lunatic film director, played by veteran Spanish director Ado Arrieta, who is trying to adapt Rohmer’s play. The film, therefore, combines behind-the-scenes scenes, rehearsals, and scenes from this film that is being shot.
Azevedo, known for films like La portuguesa or La venganza de una mujer, tells La Vanguardia that this way of adapting Rohmer’s work was on her mind, but it was when she spoke with Arrieta that she made the decision: “I was afraid of falling on the topic, but talking to Ado, and thinking that this figure of the director was him, who is such an unexpected person, it would be impossible to fall into clichés”.
This format means that the viewer of El trio en E flat does not know, on some occasions, if the main actors are acting or rehearsing the scenes. “Something very curious happened, and that is that after recording the second act, Rita Durao told me: I don’t know how I got here, but it is as far as I know the texts. I told her that nothing was wrong, to take the paper and went reading. They began to rehearse and when they said they were ready, we had already recorded them” recalls Azevedo.
In the same space, a beautiful glass house, these two ex-lovers talk through seven meetings. She tells him about her new partners, and he, unable to hide his jealousy from her, listens to her and judges these men with artistic tastes so different from his. United by a love that never ends and a piece of music by Mozart, The Trio in E flat, Paul and Adélia delve into an endless conversation about love and art. “The protagonists, in some way, being locked up in this house, remind me a bit of the parakeets in the cage of the Hitchcock movie, because they have their encounters and disagreements, one attacks the other… but once the door opens out of the cage, no one wants to get out”, details the director.
This feeling of confinement is also conditioned by the context of the shooting, since the film was filmed in confinement. “The result – Azevedo affirms – would not have been the same if the shooting situation had been different, since a sensation of appeasement and unity was generated between us that I wanted to capture in the film. That seemed more important to me than Rohmer’s text “.
Azevedo maintains the structure of the seven frames of Rohmer’s piece, which corresponds to the seven movements of Mozart’s trio, and creates an eighth frame “where everything is pitch and counter pitch precisely to investigate madness within the language of cinema.” . The director confesses that in El trio en E flat she exposes herself more than ever: “It’s something strange, let’s say it’s as if a painter after painting his picture takes a knife and cuts it, and that’s where his work ends.”
