Victoria Musiedlak’s first feature film, “First Affair”, succeeds in mixing the coldness and darkness of a murder case with the warmth and light of the awakening of desire. A legal thriller mixed with an intimate and sensual portrait brilliantly carried by Noée Abita, not to be missed at the cinema;
First affairbetween sordid murder and discovery of pleasure
With First affair, in cinemas since April 24, director Victoria Musiedlak stages with rigor and intensity a drama with multiple lines. Social chronicle, legal thriller, romantic story and even erotic drama, First affair thus successfully takes advantage of several cinemas to tell the story of the initiation journey of Nora, a young lawyer who finds herself on her first criminal case. And not least: a sordid murder.
This “first case” for Nora is not limited to the purely legal aspect. By working to defend the main suspect, she will indeed come up against a world that she does not know, an external world as well as an internal one, and have encounters which will shake up her ideas and her reality.
A great performance for Noée Abita
Noée Abita, fantastic in the role of Nora, paints a very concrete portrait as much as she embodies with fascinating confusion the sensations of lost innocence and virginity. She thus carries in First affair the association of a social and legal chronicle with an intimate, loving and sensual portrait. Indeed, his relationship with Alexis (Anders Danielsen Lie), the police officer in charge of the murder, older and more experienced, will immerse him in new and tumultuous waters. Met with the director at the 2023 Angoulême Festival, the actress explained to us:
“It was interesting for me, because it was the first time I was offered a role as a young woman, and this one specifically. She is a young woman but she delights in certain childishness. Which is something stifling, because she revels in this comfort, it’s reassuring. Studies, then work, everything is well structured and organized. And when her boss throws her into the wild, despite herself, a breach opens. It excites him and at the same time it scares him. In his work as in his family, all the cards are reshuffled. She opens her eyes to things that were hidden from her.“
“I’m getting to the heart of the matter to desecrate”
This film of “first times” thus contains very intimate sequences, scenes of awakening of desire and discovery of pleasure that Victoria Musiedlak has staged with attention and rigor:
“I have a point of view on the sequences of sex and desire, which is very technical. I don’t film reality. Actors are actors, we talk about it a lot together, very precisely about intentions, putting things into words, even putting words into caresses. I’m getting to the heart of the matter to desecrate it.
It worked very well, I think it reassures the actors, they know where they are going. I don’t let them… like Kechiche for example – whom I adore, his sequences are brilliant -, who shoots for hours, redoes the takes fifteen times… For me it’s very prepared, in advance and on set, everything is very clear about what they have to do and what is expected.“
The director, in addition to emphasizing the “pressure” she put on herself to stage the custody sequences, remaining well in the character’s point of view and spending a lot of time with her cinematographer during cutting , also remembers that a central scene of the film, the one where Nora finds Alexis in her car, was the most difficult to shoot.
It was a very important sequence, I wanted it to be sensual, for there to be this discovery of the character’s pleasure. There is no dialogue, it’s a scene that you really have to embody. We needed time, for the actors to lend themselves to the game, for the chemistry to take hold and for us to get there! So a lot of drama, and it was raining, it must have been -5°C. It was freezing, we were slipping, we were falling… (laughs)
