Diane Kurys (French: [djan kyʁis]; born 3 December 1948) is a French director, producer, filmmaker and actress. Several of her films as director are semi-autobiographical.
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Personal life
Kurys was born in Lyon, Rhône, France, the younger of two daughters. She is a daughter of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants, Lena and Michel. Diane Kurys and her older sister spent their early years in Lyon. Like many of her film's characters, she had a difficult relationship with her parents, and her traumatic childhood became a subject in many of her films. Their parents met and got married at Camp de Rivesaltes in 1942, separating in 1954. Their divorce deeply marked and affected Diane, and would become a real source of inspiration for several of her films; Kurys stated that she made films about them because she “wanted to see them back together again.” It was after this event that her mom decided to move with her two daughters to Paris, where she ran a woman’s fashion boutique, while her dad stayed in Lyon where he ran a men's clothing store. She lived with her mother after their divorce in 1954, at one point running away to join her father at age sixteen.
In her adolescence, she was radicalized in the spirit of May of '68, but became somewhat disillusioned in the aftermath, calling it a "revolution bourgeois" in an interview with Jean-Luc Wachthausen. She first met her partner and fellow filmmaker Alexandre Arcady when she was fifteen years old, in 1964, and went to live in Israel in a kibbutz near the Lebanese border. They have been a couple since the 1960s and have two production companies together. Their son Yasha, born in 1991, is an author writing under the name Sacha Sperling.
Acting career
As a student at the Jules Ferry high school, she studied modern literature at the Sorbonne before becoming a teacher and then a theatre actress in the 1970s, joining the Madeleine Renaud: Jean-Louis Barrault's company with Antoine Bourseiller and Ariane Mnouchkine at La Cartoucherie or Cafe de la Gare.
After the student revolt in May 1968, Kurys left University and along with Arcady began her involvement in theatre; initially, with Kurys as an actor, and Alexandre as both an actor and director. She acted in theatre, film, and television for eight years. Kurys mentions how she loved the environment of acting but she was not happy doing it as she couldn’t express herself and was often seen as rebellious. She felt unable to express herself under "the director or any kind of authority or control." This led to her transitioning into writing and film making.
Directorial career
In 1975, she worked with Philippe Adrien to adapt Lanford Wilson's play The Hot L Baltimore for French television, under the title Hôtel Baltimore, which she had previously performed at the Espace Cardin. The following year, she began writing an autobiographical novel, Diabolo menthe, which, with the aid of a government grant, she adapted into the screenplay for her directorial debut Peppermint Soda (1977). Set in 1963, it follows a girl named Anne losing her childhood innocence, exploring her life as a child of divorced parents and her relationship with her sister; Kurys dedicated the film to her real-life sister. In an interview, Kurys said her inspiration came "from myself, my own life, my own experience". The film was a critical and commercial success.
Kurys' next film, Cocktail Molotov, was released in 1980. Starring François Cluzet, Élise Caron and Philippe Lebas, the film portrayed the May 1968 Paris student movement through the point of view of three children: Anne, Frank, and Bruno. Though not a direct sequel, the film is considered a companion piece to Peppermint Soda, and was not as well-received.
Kurys again explored divorce in Entre Nous (Coup de foudre, 1983), this time from the maternal point of view, with Isabelle Huppert playing a mother who leaves her husband (Guy Marchand) and goes to Paris with her friend (Miou-Miou) and their children. The film, inspired by Kurys' own family history, honored the emotional manners and conventions of the nineteen-forties and -fifties, whilst depicting a feminist relationship atypical of the time. Kurys said that the film was her way "to allow them to live together once more - by putting them on screen together," as, in real life, her parents never saw each other again after the events depicted in the film. The film was extremely well-received, winning the FIPRESCI Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival, and garnering several major awards nominations, including Best Film at the 9th César Awards and Best Foreign Language Film at the 56th Academy Awards.
Kurys opened the 40th edition of the Cannes Film Festival with A Man in Love (Une homme amoureux, 1987), her English-language debut. It follows an American film star (Peter Coyote) and an unknown British actress (Greta Scacchi) who meet on the set of a period drama in Rome. At the film's conclusion, Scacchi's character gives up acting to become a writer, echoing Kurys's own transition in life, though the film was her first to largely eschew autobiography, as well as her first contemporaneous film.
Critical reception
Although Kurys' work as a filmmaker in the 1980s helped bring women's filmmaking into the mainstream of its time, her commercial successes have played a part in keeping her from being granted auteur status by many critics. Her harsher critics have called her films conventional, polished, and not challenging to cinema's status quo. In addition, her ambivalence toward feminism and dislike of the "woman director" or "women's cinema" label has played a part in her lack of feminist film study scholarship.
In a section on Kurys for French Film: texts and contexts and the first book-length study of Kurys work, film scholar Carrie Tarr argues that her work is firmly within the auteurist tradition, "a coherent body of work with a recognizable style". Kurys' use of her own life story, her inclusion of a stand-in for herself in most films, the recurring character types and situations from her memories and concerns in her present, all create a body of work specifically centered on a unique female voice. Tarr theorizes that Kurys' signature contains two voices, one which reflect her rebellion against the male-centric world she meant to escape by turning from acting to filmmaking, and the other which collaborates with the patriarchal structure she still must operate within to be successful.
Production companies
Alexandre Films was formed in 1977 with Alexandre Arcady before the release of Peppermint Soda. The company co-produced her first six films as well as a number of Arcady's, whose name it bears. The pair formed New Light Films in 1994, which produces films in both French and English.
Selected filmography
Literature
Carrie Tarr: Diane Kurys. Manchester University Press, New York, 1999, ISBN 978-0719050954