“It’s like a new beginning and you have to prove yourself to everybody all over again, and convince them that you can live up to the award. I need to feel scared and have a rush of adrenaline – and maybe a kick on the shins to shake me up.”`The Dream Life of Angels’ is reviewed on page 11. TODD HAYNES is the most adventurous and challenging film-maker currently working in American cinema Consequently, he is also liable to be misunderstood It happens on a regular basis. He plays witty and deceptive games with his audience’s preconceptions, and then nobody seems to want to join in, or else they just don’t get the rules. Take his last film, Safe, a chilling drama about a Los Angeles housewife who becomes allergic to her own environment. The movie was structured like your typical disease-of-the-week TV special, from the first flourishes of illness to the acceptance of New Age remedies Everything was set-up for the victim to recover Only she didn’t; she got worse.

The key to the film’s devastating power was in its enigmatic visual language – it gave you all the wrong signals: it promised redemption and delivered nothing of the sort. Her luminous eyes are devoid of make-up, her face scrubbed and tanned from a holiday in LA. When asked to cite an acting influence she avoids such Gallic icons as Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve or Juliet Binoche, preferring to name Gena Rowlands and Jennifer Jason Leigh.She intends to spend the rest of the year travelling round the festivals circuit. So for weeks, throughout the shoot, I didn’t look at myself a single time.”Bouchez, whose gamine appearance has been compared to the young Leslie Caron’s, still seems unconcerned about her looks. I had already played that kind of role, and I didn’t think I could bring anything new. Then he rewrote it and sent me other drafts and they got better.

I had seen his short movies which were really good, and so I decided to trust him. “When he came up on stage he said: `Elodie doesn’t know it yet, but I’ve written my first feature for her.’ He met me afterwards and said he had the cover of an edition of Cahiers du Cinema on his computer, the one from Wild Reeds with me in a swimsuit I thought: `strange’ … He never mentioned it again until the day he offered me the part.”Directors, she claims, rarely place enough confidence in their actors. She won Zonca over by investing humour in her character, Isa, which wasn’t there on the printed page.”She was too passive, and seemed to lack energy. I was just 16 and I couldn’t believe I was working with this monstre sacre”.Since then she has garnered a reputation as a fearless practitioner, especially in the steamy, adolescent turmoil of Andre Techine’s coming- of-age tale Wild Reeds. It was in this film that she caught Erick Zonca’s eye and the two eventually met at a festival, at which Bouchez presented him with an award.

She gave up university to appear in the late and legendary Serge Gainsbourg’s last film. Partly because of the title and subject matter, she gained a certain unjustified notoriety: Stan the Flasher dealt with an English teacher who exposed himself to young girls.”Some people thought it was going to be pornographic, but it wasn’t in the least bit salacious,” says Bouchez “And Gainsbourg was very sweet, calm and quite normal. Not bad going for a someone who lives modestly in a tiny flat in Pigalle.
She shared her Cannes victory with her co-star, newcomer Natacha Regnier, for the first film by Erick Zonca, The Dream Life of Angels which depicts the changing bonds of friendship between two working-class women in the north of France.It’s a long way from what some see as a traditional French preoccupation with affairs of the heart, usually glossily shot on the banks of the Seine But Bouchez has never gone for “gloss”. Elodie Bouchez, best known in Britain for her giggly, loose-limbed performance in Yolande Zauberman’s Clubbed to Death, may be only 25, but her strength and determination are evident.