Ne change rien
Pedro Costa
2009 - 100 min - 35 mm - Noir & Blanc - Portugal, France

""Ne change rien", succinctly delivers us the synopsis of this film. It was born of the friendship between the actress Jeanne Balibar, the sound engineer Philippe Morel and Pedro Costa. In other words it is a film which came into being gradually, made to measure, bar by bar, for here Jeanne Balibar is a singer, and the project was not premeditated as a complete entity from the outset. This is why it flows so seamlessly from a stage in Tokyo to the recording studio, to Rodolphe Burger’s house in Ste Marie-aux-Mines, then from rock concerts to singing lessons for Offenbach’s "La
Périchole". Some of these extracts were shown at FID 2007 as part of the Pedro Costa retrospective. How do you capture music on film? The project, despite its patchwork nature, explores this question fully. Filming Jeanne Balibar above all else, an actress who suffers for her art (one piece uses torture as a refrain) with her voice. Costa puts his own characteristic stamp of rigour and purity on both the work and the music: the task of making music, the unfinished article as well as the end-product.
Aside from rare snippets of concerts, there are also rehearsals and yet more takes, false starts, dissatisfaction and countless attempts before recording. The choice is this: whether or not to delay the fruits of your labour through infinite patience, where harsh demands explode without making any concessions for the demands of singing on the voice and the body that is making the music.
The real theatre is no longer the stage, but the body subjected to the toil and challenges of art; the real show is what the cinema strips bare in the wings, ever hesitant, bow poised between black and white, ever ready to begin again. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)