Léa Mysius: ​‘I want­ed to film real­i­ty – from this came the fantastical’

Léa Mysius’ bewitch­ing sec­ond fea­ture, The Five Dev­ils, explores the fright­en­ing fall­out of a family’s past as it col­lides with the present. It sees pen­sive, eight-year old Vicky (Sal­ly Dramé) attempt­ing to bot­tle the aro­ma of her moth­er, Joanne (Adèle Exar­chopou­los), when mix­ing potions trans­ports her into the past. Here, where only her mys­te­ri­ous aunt Julia (Swala Emati) can see her, Vicky begins to unrav­el the secrets that have haunt­ed her family.

LWLies: Smell is one of the more chal­leng­ing sens­es to trans­late for cin­e­ma – what was behind your desire to explore the sense of smell on screen?

Mysius: The idea was drawn from my own child­hood when my twin sis­ter and I used to make potions. When I wrote the script, I hadn’t thought of what a chal­lenge it would be to cap­ture this par­tic­u­lar sense. I tried to film some­thing invis­i­ble by start­ing with very con­crete things, like lit­tle jars that have evoca­tive colours and textures.

Things became more abstract as [the film] draws on mem­o­ries. Ideas of gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty, and mixed-raced iden­ti­ty are cen­tral to The Five Dev­ils. How did you nav­i­gate bal­anc­ing that ground­ed real­ism with ele­ments of fan­ta­sy and magic? 

It is quite a baroque film but it had not hit me how rich it was in mean­ing. All those things you talk about in terms of issues of race, et cetera, for me, I want­ed to film real­i­ty. From this real­ism came the fan­tas­ti­cal ele­ments. As a film­mak­er, you’re always torn between these two things: on the one hand, you want to give this rep­re­sen­ta­tion you believe should be absolute­ly nor­mal, like women in same-sex rela­tion­ships and Black peo­ple cen­tral in these sto­ries. At the same time, you have to acknowl­edge the real­i­ty that there is racism and those issues exist. The fan­tas­ti­cal ele­ments of the film trans­late these issues.

The open­ing image of Joanne scream­ing into the fire is imme­di­ate­ly pow­er­ful. Was this always the film’s introduction?

The first thing that came to me when I decid­ed to write this film was the stark image of a young woman at night scream­ing in front of a fire. The sec­ond was a young girl who has a gift for smell and that sense can take her back into the past. Bring­ing the two togeth­er is what cre­at­ed the film’s sce­nario. Also, I was read­ing a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic book by Pas­cal Quig­nard who describes this the­o­ry of the chaos and a prim­i­tive world that comes before the birth of a child. Before being brought into the world, every baby has this chaot­ic, sav­age, fire-fuelled vision that pro­ceeds their entry. The film’s first image is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this very prim­i­tive world.

In that way then, this film is your baby that begins with a vision of fire.

Well, in fact, we didn’t have any­one to scream in that scene at the end of film­ing. So, that scream you hear is my own. 

The film’s depic­tion of a moth­er-daugh­ter bond is very spe­cif­ic in its fluc­tu­a­tions – what was your inten­tion there?

In this moth­er-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship, I didn’t want Joanne to be com­plete­ly sub­sumed by her daugh­ter. Adèle is a gen­er­ous actor, she played with the kids and guid­ed them, so I had to give her this image of a giraffe walk­ing slow­ly but rigid­ly and around her is this lit­tle bird pick­ing at her con­stant­ly, but she’s car­ry­ing on at the same pace. Of course, that does not mean there is no love between them. The dis­tance caus­es Vicky to have this des­per­a­tion to cling to her moth­er and anchor her in the real world because it feels like Joanne’s mind is else­where. The image I gave her to repro­duce this con­cept is that the moth­er is a hot air bal­loon and she’s hold­ing the rope try­ing to bring her back to earth.

The use of atmos­pher­ic music through­out the film is great but the nee­dle drop of ​‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ is par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable.

The score is made up of two types of scores, real­ly. The first is the addi­tion­al music, made up of pop that cre­ates a sense of spec­ta­cle. The oth­er, cre­at­ed by our com­pos­er, is much sober­er and dark­er. I want­ed the film to fuse these to give a sense of the con­flict­ing image through the score. When I write scripts I often lis­ten to one or two songs and ​‘Total Eclipse’ was one of them. In fact, at one point I thought I’d call the film ​‘Total Eclipse.’ There’s a bit of back-and-forth between the film and the song.