When teenage passion plays with fire
What does a l5-year-old from a boring suburban village like to do in the summer? For a girl named Livia, this might include dangerously pursuing a married man and igniting forest fires in the process.

Claire Simon's new film "Ça brûle" tells such a story, and is testimony, as the director puts it, to "feminine desire": the unlimited passion made famous by heroines like Medea and Phedra. "Women's desire is like that - powerful," Simon said as we chatted at the Bastille café Les Phares. "I know it's not in style to be feminist, but my film is. I show a 15-year-old girl who desires a 45-year-old man, and gets him. The classic way of showing this situation is from the man's perspective, never the girl's."

"Ça brûle"  debuted at Cannes, where it played in the "Quinzaine des réalisateurs" section and received a standing ovation. Taking a bow next to the director were a dozen firemen from the town of Jouques, who battled the fires set by the fillm's young protagonist. Fire is an important element to Simon, a symbol of anger, rebellion, frustration, and, of course, desire.

The film follows Livia (newcomer Camille Varenne), a rebellious, bored teenager living in Le Var, a region in southeast France. When one day she is thrown from her horse, it is the volunteer firefighter Jean Susini (Gilbert Melki) who comes to her rescue. The interaction is the beginning of a crazed, fierce obsession for him.

Simon makes the young Livia's vitality - and destructiveness - viscerally present, as the girl swings her legs over her moped or stalks the handsome Susini. Watching the film, one can easily remember the spontaneous litheness of adolescence, the sense of being deliriously in the moment. She is unstoppable in her quest for Susini. The fact that he is married with children is no obstacle, as she uses this to her benefit and vies for the position of family babysitter.

Livia, dashing through the forest with matches or making out with her friend Amanda (in order to learn how to do it properly), is clearly slotted in a liminal zone in her community. The daughter of an English mother and raised in Le Var (as was the director), she feels "foreign" in the provinces. Neighbors even refuse to say "bonjour" to her.

Simon explains that Livia has no problem burning down her own environment because this environment has scorned her. "We live in an era of no future, attracted to destruction. Witness our obsession with tsunamis or 9/11."
    
Simon, a self-taught filmmaker since 1980 and directing teacher at the prestigious FEMIS film school, first became famous in cinema circles with "Récréations" (1992), a documentary which highlighted the unrestrained if not perverse desires of children in a playground. Desire and submission has been an evolving motif in the work of Simon. "My earlier documentary ‘Coûte que coûte' (1995) features a heroine who pretends to be pregnant just because someone asked her if she were pregnant and she is someone who says yes to everyone. ...My idea of desire has changed. This Livia says yes to nobody. She is her own person."

Indeed, while the first shot of the movie features Livia on the ground, Susini cradling her in his arms, the last shot reverses this power relation. Now it is Livia who cradles the fireman as he dies from the fumes of her own making.

"Ça brûle" ends with a path reaching for the sky, a symbol of eternal love. Is this how the director imagines love - so idealistically?

"No," she answered simply. "But a 15-year-old would see it that way."