Called urgently to filming which has stopped due to evaporated funding, Manon, screenwriter, is expected to be the savior to cut scenes from her script. The main protagonist of “Coupez!”, Laure Desmazières’ first novel, will also plunge into another painful ellipse from her past.
Manon works for the dream industry, but is living a nightmare. A well-established screenwriter in precarious circumstances, she is urgently called to the set of a film she has written. An investor has reduced his financing. The production no longer has the means to shoot all the planned scenes. But because this script is the first for her that will materialize into a film, she immediately sets out to help the production. And too bad if this work is not paid.
I wonder if ‘cut’ is the horrible word that leads me to make comparisons between cinema and cookware. Or if simply I would like to kill the one who requires considerable unpaid work from me over the course of a weekend.
Manon will experience 72 hours of intense emotion. At first stunned, pressed by an assistant director who was disrespectful towards her work, nevertheless reassured by the director who believes in her, Manon proves incapable of blackening the slightest line despite her promise. Yet time is running out. Nothing is more expensive than a stopped shoot. And then, with this rewrite, the star actress could assert her right to leave the project. The screenwriter must reassure her, reassure the production, reassure herself too.
Swiss army knife
Manon manages the pressure while concentrating on creating this artificial ellipse. But cutting central scenes without compromising the continuity of the story unfolding in real time seems beyond his strength. She is also tormented by her salary that production is reluctant to pay her, by a master class that she must prepare and by one of her students who fails on her script about a heron who thinks she is a dragonfly. As a bonus, she feels a furious desire to set foot on the soil of the atrocious “Cold Lands”, as she has called them, taking her back to a difficult moment in her existence. Nothing is going well for Manon.
I often say to my mother: ‘we are Swiss army knives’. Not the luxury kitchen knives magnetized to the walls of Hollywood stars’ kitchens. Micro-Swiss knives, stuck in the ground during a bivouac near the stove, rusty, disgusting. Even opinions. We are opines.
With this first novel, Laure Desmazières draws inspiration from her experience as a screenwriter to masterfully describe, sometimes with humor, often with darkness, their precariousness. But “Cut!“ is not limited to this observation. The story advances masked to better reveal the rebirth of Manon, a woman who faces with strength and courage another ellipse in her life. At the end of this chaotic weekend, Manon will no longer be the same Manon. His real salary is undoubtedly this.
Ellen Ichters/SF
Laure Desmazières, “Cut!”, Quidam Editions, August 2024.
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