The American director, screenwriter and producer Joseph Losey (1909-1984), an impossible-to-label maverick, left us a body of work distinguished by his fight for tolerance and his talent for psychological analysis. He directed a series of unforgettable films, such as The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Blind Date (1959), The Servant (1963), Accident (Special Jury Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 1967), Figures in a Landscape (1970), The Go-Between (Golden Palm at Cannes in 1971), The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Mr. Klein (César for Best Film and Best Director in 1977), Don Giovanni (1979). In November 1968, Bertrand Tavernier and André S. Labarthe went to London to film a portrait of Losey. Fifty-five years later, 16mm reels were found. The film was never edited. Viewing this forgotten material from the archives drove Dante Desarthe to complete this portrait of one of the most brilliant filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. The film tells Losey’s story as an artist and a man: his early career, the collaboration with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, McCarthyism, the flight to London and then to Paris, the films written by Harold Pinter and the film he never made of Marcel Proust’s Recherche.
DIRECTOR: Dante Desarthe
NATION: France
YEAR: 2023
RUNTIME: 60′
Original version with subtitles