Nightclubbing
A Golden Youth
Film. Evocation of The Palace golden age by one of its muse, the Eva Ionesco’s new film A Golden Youth is a great journey through the night. Interview.
By Jacques Braunstein
Discovered as a child on the sulphurous photographs of her mother (which was the subject of her first directed film called My Little Princess, 2011), as becoming a teenager she also lived the crazy years of The Palace, an adventure that she tells in her last film, A Golden Youth. Nevertheless, Eva Ionesco’s life is not limited to these nocturals adventures ; as a comedian she played for Patrice Chèreau or Luc Bondy ; as an actress she appeared in more than sixty films and wrote a novel called Innocente (Grasset) which was also about her youth.
“A real dive into the nights of The Palace, A Golden Youth is a back in time journey in an era as punk as disco
”
Her film is co-written by Simon Liberati (Anthology of Appearances) who became her husband. To the detailled description of The Palace nights, they added a plot worthy of Dangerous Liaisons. A couple of nighthawks (Galatéa Bellugi who looks like young Eva Ionesco, and her sun, the actor Lukas Ionesco saw in Larry Clark’s film The Smell of Us) meet a couple of rich dilettantes who have a poisonous seduction, played by Melvil Poupaud and Isabelle Huppert. We also note that among the supportive role there is Alain-Fabien Delon, the doppelganger of his father, whose director appreciated his strict and vaguely unfriendly sides in line with the end of 1970’s that she described and which is the opposite of the “cool wave” adopted by the current actors nowadays.
A real dive into the nights of The Palace, A Golden Youth is a back in time journey in an era as punk as disco, where we were celebrating because we were convinced that we were going to die soon. Hopefully, Eva Ionesco is not dead and she was optimally positioned to tell this story.
