Pierre Salvadori: Meddling by the seaside

Audrey Tatou manipulates a situation to try to make her mother happy in Beautiful Lies, with some tragically funny circumstances. Photos / Supplied

Audrey Tautou's name is up in lights but Sete is the unsung star of Beautiful Lies.

The small Mediterranean seaside town popularly known as "the Venice of Languedoc" is the setting for the bright comedy of mistaken intentions in which Tautou reunites with writer-director Pierre Salvadori - the two worked together on 2006's Priceless.

Sete is down a side road little travelled by visitors to the South of France, but it's an enchanting detour to a compact fishing port, laced by canals, alongside which cafes serve sensational bouillabaisse (fish soup) only metres from the boats that caught the fish. And Salvadori says the location was hugely important to the feel of the film.

"For me it was a revelation," says the genial 47-year-old whose Wild Target was recently remade with Bill Nighy taking the Jean Rochefort role of a conflicted hitman. "I didn't know that you could still find a place on the French Riviera that was still so authentic. Because it is trapped between the Mediterranean and a lake, it provides a very soft, golden light and the canals reflect light on the walls. It is like the city is enchanted by light and by water."

His other explanation for Sete's appeal is pure French.

"It could be set anywhere - it's just the story of a daughter and a mother and a lover - but we are shooting for nine weeks, so we thought why not make it somewhere nice where the light and the life would be beautiful. If you are shooting at night and you finish at 6am, the market is open and you can have a glass of wine and some oysters at the end of your night's work."

In Beautiful Lies, Tautou plays 30-something Emilie Dandrieux, who runs a small hairdressing salon in the unnamed town and worries about her mother Maddy (the wonderful Nathalie Baye), who has still not recovered from the blues after her divorce four years previously. Meanwhile Jean (Sami Boujila), who does handyman chores for Emilie, is secretly in love with her and declares himself in an anonymous letter which Emilie, in front of him and to his chagrin, promptly bins. But later she is inspired to type it out and deliver it anonymously to Maddy in the hope it will re-ignite her loveless heart. Complications ensue.

The set-up and its repeated payoffs play out like early Shakespeare, which is an effect Salvadori says he was trying for.

"It is totally what I wanted because when you are able to provide emotion in this situation, it is beautiful, it is very poetic. Before we started work on the screenplay, Benoit [Graffin, co-writer] and I read a lot of the old classic comedies like Moliere, and we also looked at the Hollywood comedies of the 30s and I said to him, 'Let's write a real story with surprise and like a little fable'.

"If you do that it allows you to put a lot of cruelty in the story without everyone crying in the aisles. This is what comedy allows you to do. I wanted to bring as much artificiality as I could to proceedings: this is a fable, but it talks about real feelings. It's about how people decide to make other people happy without asking them first, which is always a disaster."

I don't tell Salvadori that I was not much taken with Priceless, in which Tautou plays a gold-digging con artist on the Riviera, in part because it seemed so cynical about human affairs: a deceiver is allowed a happy ending. But I wonder why Beautiful Lies likewise seems to reward its main character for vain, spoiled and manipulative behaviour.

"What happens at the end has no importance in a comedy," he explains. "It's a convention. At the end of Priceless, Audrey Tautou and Gad Elmaleh drive off on a scooter and when we made the shot, I said to the crew, 'If you want to know the truth, at the first gas station he is going to run away'.

"What's more interesting about Tautou's character here is that through all the movie, she is trying to protect herself from melancholy, she is afraid of sadness. But her mother knows that sometimes in life there is sadness; it is a component of life."

Lowdown
Who: French Director Pierre Salvadori
What: Beautiful Lies, starring Audrey Tatou
When: At cinemas from Thursday

-TimeOut