The Films of Sophie Fillières

Melissa Anderson

In the late writer-director’s works, portraits of headstrong women under the influence of adventurous spirits.

Emmanuelle Devos as Pomme in If You Don’t, I Will. Courtesy L’Alliance New York. © Pierre Grise Productions.

“The Films of Sophie Fillières,” L’Alliance New York, 55 East Fifty-Ninth Street, New York City, October 14–November 11, 2025

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Sometimes a fake identity reveals more than it conceals. After Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos), the female protagonist of French filmmaker Sophie Fillières’s If You Don’t, I Will (2014), warily accepts a ride along a deserted stretch of road from a male stranger, he asks her name. The middle-aged woman, in temporary flight from her increasingly dire marriage, hesitates for a second before answering: “Gena Rowlands.”

Emmanuelle Devos as Pomme and Mathieu Amalric as Pierre in If You Don’t, I Will. Courtesy L’Alliance New York. © Pierre Grise Productions.

Like the most celebrated characters played by that great American actress, Pomme is headstrong, unpredictable, full of idiosyncrasies—qualities she shares with many other heroines in Fillières’s corpus, works that have rarely been screened in the US (If You Don’t is the only one to have received a theatrical run in this country). L’Alliance New York’s posthumous tribute to this overlooked writer-director—Fillières died in 2023, at the age of fifty-eight—presents five of her seven features and four shorts. The retrospective serves as both an introduction and a valediction.

Chiara Mastroianni as Nathalie/Célimène and Agathe Bonitzer as Anaïs in Pardon My French. Courtesy L’Alliance New York. © Pierre Grise Productions.

Born in 1964, Fillières first garnered notice as a member of the Young French Cinema, a wide cohort of auteurs (Arnaud Desplechin perhaps its signal figure) whose 1990s films, often made on minuscule budgets, heralded a return to keenly observed realism following the gossamer, glam artifice that defined the cinéma du look of the 1980s. By the time of Fillières’s fourth feature, 2009’s Pardon My French (Un chat un chat in the original), she had become the maestra of cinéma du kook. The film’s central character (played by Chiara Mastroianni), a thirty-five-year-old novelist with writer’s block, is so adrift that she can’t even decide which name she answers to: Is she Nathalie (as most people call her), Célimène, or Natasha? Temporarily living at her mother’s house, where she shares a foldout couch with her forbearing grade-schooler son, Nathalie is further destabilized by a teenage fan, Anaïs (Agathe Bonitzer, Fillières’s daughter). Even though she’s so obsessed with Nathalie that she not only steals her mail but hoards her discarded cigarette butts, Anaïs’s devotion barely masks her narcissism: “Write about me,” the seventeen-year-old proposes to Nathalie as a cure for her creative dead end.

Chiara Mastroianni as Nathalie/Célimène and Agathe Bonitzer as Anaïs in Pardon My French. Courtesy L’Alliance New York. © Pierre Grise Productions.

Pardon My French’s comic fizz derives from Nathalie’s capricious behavior, her oddity enhanced by Mastroianni’s wide-eyed guilelessness. She stores a ten-euro note in the fridge, requests a pack of Marlboro Lights at her local tabac but then insists the cashier not sell them to her, and decides to stop speaking at a therapy session, muteness that continues when she runs into a friend on the street (talking is “just noise coming out of my mouth,” the erratic authoress declares). The strange push-and-pull between Nathalie and her weirdo admirer is motored by an unrushed, heady screwball energy, in which even lycéenne Anaïs’s oral philosophy exam becomes a puckish set piece.

Sandrine Kiberlain as Margaux, Melvil Poupaud as Marc, and Agathe Bonitzer as Margaux in When Margaux Meets Margaux. Courtesy L’Alliance New York. © Christmas in July.

Bonitzer finds herself in another folie à deux with an older woman—with whom she shares the same name—in When Margaux Meets Margaux (2018). Or is the twentysomething Margaux really the younger version of fortyish Margaux (Sandrine Kiberlain)? If this days-of-future-past seriocomedy too often runs aground with its scenes of rue and regret, it at least showcases Kiberlain’s great talent for delivering, with a light yet lethal touch, imperious rejoinders when her Margaux is stuck in absurd situations, never more so than at a house party where she’s the only person over twenty-five.

Mathieu Amalric as Pierre and Emmanuelle Devos as Pomme in If You Don’t, I Will. Courtesy L’Alliance New York. © Pierre Grise Productions.

A more traditional, and more wretched, dyad is the focus in If You Don’t, I Will, which concerns the strained, often caustic interactions between Pomme and her husband, Pierre (Mathieu Amalric), a Lyonnais couple who have been together for an unspecified amount of time (she has a young-adult son from a previous relationship). “What have we become?” Pomme, aghast, asks Pierre after another passive-aggressive dustup. Like most unhappy couples, they feel no shame in performing their acrimony in front of others, publicly demonstrating just how invested they are in perpetuating their immiserating dynamic—what Fillières once aptly called “the more or less low-level violence of conjugality.” Although spousal anguish has been the subject of countless movies, Fillières’s film, while certainly gloomy, is never cynical. She leavens her dour scenes from a marriage with an askew wit and bizarre, vivifying incidents: namely everything that Pomme experiences when, during one of her usual weekend hikes with Pierre and after another petty fracas, she walks off, determined to rough it in the woods rather than face one more torturous day with him in their bobo apartment.

Resolutely alone, Barberie “Barbie” Bichette (Agnès Jaoui, another writer-director and Fillières’s coeval), the incongruously named protagonist of This Life of Mine (2024), battles with no significant other, acolyte, or younger variant of herself but rather her own fickle mind. (Fillières died shortly after shooting on This Life of Mine wrapped; the film was completed by her children—Agathe and her brother, Adam Bonitzer—along with editor François Quiqueré.) The fifty-five-year-old writer is introduced staring at her laptop screen, talking to herself—perhaps her most frequent conversation partner—as she anthropomorphizes various fonts (Barbie deems Andalé Mono as a typeface “that really watches what it eats”). The last one to arrive at an advertising-agency meeting for which the task is to brainstorm cereal slogans, Barbie wordlessly strides up to the easel pad, composes a poem, and marches right back out with her creation.

Unlike the heroines in Fillières’s earlier films—all of whom are pixilated in some way, whether owing to impasses or outré situations—Barbie has a mental collapse, brought on by an encounter with a childhood friend whom she insists is a revenant. Yet, no matter how dire her circumstances, Barbie, like her foresisters, always maintains an ineradicable shred of nobility, a touching lucidity even in her chaotic state. Most importantly, she grasps, more astutely than any of her predecessors, that a life unmoored can also be a life of adventure. She’s a woman under the influence—of a restless mind, a tireless spirit.

Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published in November by Film Desk Books.