[An interview to be found in the winter issue of têtu·, on sale from December 10 or by subscription.] With The Children Are Fine, his third feature in cinemas at only 26 years old, Nathan Ambrosioni teams up again with Camille Cottin and continues to delve into the theme of family.
Photography: Tanguy Sergheraert for têtu·
It’s not the most expected theme from a very young gay filmmaker. But Nathan Ambrosioni gladly confesses an obsession with family, the common denominator of the three feature films he has already directed. “The inevitability of family ties fascinates me, he explains. What do we do with people we are born into and do not choose? Must we necessarily accept them? It’s a place where love can exist, but also where violence can emerge. There are so many different family dynamics that it is an endless source of inspiration for me.”
In 2018, in The Paper Flags, he unfolds the story of a brother and sister who reconnect after twelve years of absence. His precocity—he was only 19 then—earned him comparisons to Xavier Dolan. In 2023, in Toni, in the Family, he entrusted Camille Cottin with the role of a single mother of five children. The duo, having formed a friendship, returned for The Children Are Fine, where the actress plays a newly separated lesbian who must take in her nephew and niece when her sister leaves them in her care.
Nathan in the Family
Over time, one tends to want to ask Nathan Ambrosioni how his relationship with his own family unfolds. Ups and downs, he sums up. I find it difficult to go back to one’s family as an adult, when you feel you have unknotted a lot of things on your side. An odd dynamic settles in: you become a child again and you revert to regressive patterns… I don’t always like who I am in the presence of my parents.
Like many of us, returning to his native Alpes-Maritimes also brings the young man back to the time when he did not yet embrace his homosexuality. In middle school and high school, a coming out was out of the question: “I remember a boy who was suspected of being gay, and I could see the hell he went through. There were no openly queer people in my school. I was lucky that people mostly talked about my films; they served as a distraction.” Indeed, before the career we know, the teenager dabbled in horror films he made as a hobby. In hindsight, he already detects in these projects “something camp”, even if he did not yet allow himself to be openly gay.
A Fantasized Coming Out
It was at the age of 20 that he came out, right between the releases of his first two feature films. In his eyes, the before/after is evident in his work: “Today, I think The Paper Flags is a work very distant from my current filmography, because I did it without truly being honest about who I was, which produced a very heteronormative narrative. When I watch it again, I think about its writing and my will to hide my sexual identity at all costs.” Once, Toni, in the Family stands as a liberation. He even managed to include there this hilarious scene where a teenager attempts to announce his homosexuality to his family… to complete indifference. “That non-reaction is almost a fantasy, analyzes the director. It didn’t unfold like that for me, even though my parents were not violent nor shocked. I simply wanted to write a scene that would have helped me if I had wanted to come out earlier from the closet.”
The act of owning his sexual orientation does not shield the young filmmaker from the pitfalls faced by many queer projects, such as when he is told that the heroine’s homosexuality would be superfluous… “When I’m told that the fact she loves women makes the story harder, I think it is entirely necessary that she be a lesbian, he says. So the character remains a lesbian. It’s a political choice. Beyond cinema, it’s a social fight that is taking place.”
New Lesbian Narratives
The fight is also to represent something beyond the difficulties or the coming out of homosexuality: “There are already plenty of films that revolve around the discovery of a character’s sexual identity, the oppression they suffer, or about illness and death. I believe that today it is important to give queer characters stories that are usually reserved for heterosexual characters. We must live something else!”
From this perspective, The Children Are Fine resonates intelligently with The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s film with Julianne Moore released in 2010. While the latter focused on the quest by the children of a lesbian couple for their donor father, Ambrosioni’s film has the mother disappear and the lesbians do not need a man. With his film, as well as those by Alice Douard (Proofs of Love) and Anna Cazenave Cambet (Love Me Tender), this year lesbians are served with new narratives!
