“Les Amandiers”, for the love of je(u)

Even if she sometimes likes to refute her propensity to deliver openly autobiographical films, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi likes to draw from her life the raw material for the stories she tells when she is behind and in front of the camera. This was particularly the case for A castle in Italy in 2013 then The summer visitors in 2018 – and if the first of these two feature films went nicely from family drama to Italian comedy, the second exasperated by its too openly navel-gazing side. This year, the Frenchwoman is revisiting her years of training, remembering her time at the Ecole des Amandiers, in Nanterre, an offshoot of the eponymous theater directed from 1982 to 1990 by Patrice Chéreau.