French-American actor and director Julie Delpy has tackled culture clash in comedies before in ”Two Days in Paris” and “Two Days in New York,” but it’s never been as poignant as in “Meet the Barbarians,” where she explores the journey of a Syrian family who find refuge in a village in Northern France.
The movie, which marks Delpy’s feature comeback after helming the Netflix series “On the Verge,” is set in Paimpont, a small town in France’s Brittany region that is preparing to welcome Ukrainian refugees. But instead of Ukrainians, Syrian refugees settle in town, causing some tension among locals and testing their liberal beliefs.
Charades is at Venice selling the film, which will screen at the Toronto Film Festival, and also has “Vermiglio” and “Their Children After Them” on its sales slate.
Delpy penned, directed and stars in the film as Joelle, a progressive schoolteacher who enlists the help of her devoted friend (Sandrine Kiberlain) to make the Syrian family feel at home despite the bigotry of some neighbors, such as plumber Hervé (Laurent Lafitte). The film shows how both sides warm up to and learn from one another, becoming better people in the process. The cast includes Ziad Bakri (“The Weekend Away”), India Hair (“Three Friends”) and Mathieu Demy (“The Bureau”).
Delpy said she started thinking of the idea for the film around 2012 when the war in Syria broke out. “People escaped raping, slaughter and war, getting on boats, and trying to cross borders,” Delpy tells Variety. “I was really interested in this situation of people trying to survive and find asylum.” While the refugee crisis has been dealt with before in dramas, it has seldom been the topic of a comedy.
Delpy says finding humorous aspects within the refugee experience was a way to make the story more accessible to broader audiences. “My first instinct was, ‘This is horribly sad and heartbreaking.’ And my second was, ‘How do I reach people that are not necessarily easily reached by this subject matter?’” The answer, Delpy says, was comedy.
She says the script took a turn when the war in Ukraine began because she found it “really shocking” to see that “no one cared about the Syrian refugees,” but “everyone I knew had Ukrainian refugees in their apartments in Portugal, Paris and Poland.”
“Everyone was opening their doors to Ukrainians and I had heard so many horrible stories of Syrian refugees being stuck. I was like, ‘Really, there are refugees and refugees?’” Delpy suggested that there was a sort of cast system within the world of refugees.
Yet, she says she didn’t want the film to be about politics, and instead focus “on the basic human side of it.”
“It just moved me a lot and also interests me as a subject matter,” she says. But even then, “Meet the Barbarians” took a while to finance. She and her longtime producer Michael Gentille at Paris-based the Film (“The Skylab”) got Canal+ on board early on, but also faced some closed doors.
“Some people said ‘no’ because they thought negative things about what the film was about. They didn’t even read the script in a proper way, I think,” Delpy says. Disney+ nabbed SVOD rights to the film, while Le Pacte (“Anatomy of a Fall”) acquired French distribution rights.
Although it’s a comedy, “Meet the Barbarians” was based on “thorough research on how Syrian refugees ended up in France and how their journey was,” says Delpy, who penned the script with Matthieu Rumani (“Family Business”) and Nicolas Slomka (“Fiasco”), with the collaboration of Léa Doménach (“Bernadette”). “Everyone has a different story. You have a million different stories.”
“Meet the Barbarians” makes fun of bigots but it also makes fun of social justice activists. Delpy, who herself is highly progressive, says she “[knows] all about woke” because she lives in L.A.
“I’m surrounded by woke,” she says. “And listen, some of it is great because it’s important, obviously, to be open-minded and stuff. And the truth is, I’ve been raised by parents who are so open-minded.”
Asked whether she would consider making a similar movie centering on immigration and based in the U.S., where she has been living for many years, Delpy says “it would be very different.”
“Because, first of all, there are guns everywhere. So it lasts five minutes. Everyone gets shot,” she says. “No, I’m exaggerating. But it would be very different.”
She says she’s tried to write a ”satirical film set in the U.S. about the politics,” but was never able to get it made. “I remember at the time, there were readers in an agency I was with that said it was the best thing they’d ever read, but no one ended up financing it. It was called ‘World Wars and Other Fun Stuff to Watch on the Evening News.’”
Over the years, Delpy has also been asked repeatedly whether she’ll ever reunite with Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater for a last “Before” opus. The trio previously delivered the Oscar-nominated “Before Midnight” (2013), “Before Sunset” (2004) and “Before Sunrise” (1995), but she says it’s still not in the cards because they haven’t come up with a good idea for it. “The idea that was thrown around was about my character dying of cancer, and I thought it would be not exactly… Actually, I think Richard and Ethan agreed as well that it didn’t feel like the right thing.”
“To me, those characters are a study of relationship at different time of your life,” she says. “If my character is dying of cancer, it becomes another story, like a sensationalist love story.”
