Julien (Éric Caravaca), a young bookseller, has a dream: to make a living from his writing. Thanks to his acquaintances, he manages to get an appointment with a renowned Parisian publisher, Judith Zahn (played by Karin Viard). Failing to publish him, the young woman has other plans and decides to seduce him. A romance then begins. But the aspiring author takes advantage of their proximity to steal the publisher’s father’s memoirs and turn them into a best-selling book… A mixture of romance, betrayal and humor, The Ambitious is broadcast Wednesday July 3, 2024 at 8:55 p.m. on Arte. To make her feature film, Catherine Corsini drew her inspiration from the greatest, and in particular from Million Dollar Babyone of Clint Eastwood’s cult films.
How did Catherine Corsini use Million Dollar Baby on the set of The Ambitious?
In 2006, Catherine Corsini was at the helm of the film The Ambitious. A project in which she is keen to depict these “people who have the talent but not the instructions”She then created characters that were both modern and romantic. “Julien is driven by my attachment to the heroes of 19th century literature that tell the story of young provincials rising to Paris. The reality is perhaps quite different today, but in these books, Paris is represented as the city where anything can happen, or at least the city you have to go through if you want to succeed. Faced with this tradition, there was the desire to portray a modern, strong female character who has managed to make a central place for herself in society, even if we can imagine that she must have had a hard time.”she explains in the press kit. But in addition to these very well-written characters, the director also wanted to work on the way the scenes were filmed with a certain meticulousness. “The reference is a bit pretentious, but I had seen Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby and I said to myself that I would have liked to film writing like he films boxing: as something dynamic and alive. I wanted to show that writing is not just an abstract exercise but an effort, a concrete work.”she admits.
These real people who inspired the characters in the film The Ambitious
The film and its development stem from the same concept: that of inspiration and appropriation. Julien secretly steals the memories of Judith’s father, a revolutionary, to make a book. An act that poses a moral problem, but which also translates something very real and sometimes unconscious in society. “I think we are made up of the lives of others,” explains Catherine Corsini in the film’s press kit.We draw inspiration from it in all cases. Especially when we work on a subject like that of Les Ambitieux, we are forced to think about what we have experienced, observed, and the others around us serve as objects of reflection, examples. We are constantly stealing sensations, feelings, or more specific things here and there. I often have the feeling of stealing things from people to feed on them, but I try to mix it up. It’s true that when you’re a filmmaker, you have a bit of a feeling of impunity, of omnipotence, and that having a point of view legitimizes you.”. So she claims to have borrowed the codes of Clint Eastwood’s cinema, and even, for the character of the father, to have drawn her inspiration from very real sources. “He’s a character that we imagined to be like Régis Debray or Goldman, a committed man who burned his wings. I also thought of Michèle Firk, a young film critic who killed herself in Guatemala so as not to give away her fellow guerrillas.”she adds. As such, fiction is never far from the truth.
