While the public never gave up on me – they had been and continue to be so giving in their denial of the many and varied misunderstandings by showing up, sometimes en masse, often in large numbers – they did not take to La Belle verte. It was a crushing failure. In this profession, after all these months, these years of slow, patient work, everything can hinge on a single moment, when someone tells you: “A very poor first screening, the film’s dead.” And it’s true, they never get the numbers wrong, these remorseless monitors of ticket sales, never. For them, you either exist or you cease to exist, it’s all down to the blessed tally counter. They were right about it all, about the numbers, about how the film would be received out in the world, about the contempt likely to be poured on its content, about the fit and proper burial it would receive within the Parisian elite. But they were wrong about one thing: a film is never dead. A film, a work of art, lives on. The importance that human beings attach to things is a living fact, which itself also lives on. The only important thing is that which has assumed importance, and times change. Over the years, La Belle verte has bucked the trend and started to come into its own, to grow, making its presence felt like a living entity, without me doing anything for it, by dint of people’s need for it and what it bellowed out to the world … Was I ahead of my time? Are we on the edge of such an abyss in the way our society is run that we now need to radically overhaul everything, as this film does, to be able to invent a different society?

Coline Serreau, #COLINESERREAU, Actes Sud, 2019