About her new project: The Kate Logan Affair
Alexis Bledel is in Montreal on the South Shore shooting the film The Kate Logan Affair, in which the star of the now canelled TV series The Gilmore Girls, plays a police officer.
MONTREAL - The Kate Logan Affair is a film about something getting lost in translation, so it was appropriate that my recent conversation with Noël Mitrani, the film's writer-director, had its own little bilingual twist.
Mitrani was on the phone from the Kate Logan set in the South Shore burg of Chambly last week, and for the first 10 minutes or so, we gabbed away in the language of Spielberg.
But when Mitrani began talking in some depth about the themes of this $2.5-million Canadian production, starring Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls fame, he started to struggle to find the right words. At which point, we switched to French - and all became clear.
That kind of cross-cultural confusion is at the heart of The Kate Logan Affair, an English-language movie produced by Montreal-based Galafilm, and writing about it came naturally to Mitrani. This is a guy who was born in Toronto to parents from France, moved back to the homeland when he was 5, grew up in Paris and then moved back to Canada five years ago, settling in Montreal. So he knows all about living with a language that feels like it's not your own.
Mitrani - who made a big impression with his brilliant first feature, Sur la trace d'Igor Rizzi, in 2006 - actually penned the screenplay for The Kate Logan Affair en français, and later rewrote it in English, with a little help from some writing consultants.
He felt the film had to be in English - and not because that would make it a more commercially viable project.
"It works in English because it's the story of a French guy lost in an English world," said Mitrani. "It's a way to describe a character like me. When I'm in English, I'm not the same person. I feel lost."
That's when, naturally enough, the conversation switched into French.
"When I'm in English, I don't have the same ability to express myself," said Mitrani. "The character in the film loses part of his intelligence because he's not in his first language."
In the film, which began shooting late last month and wraps next Monday, Montreal-based actor Laurent Lucas - who also hails from France - plays Benoît Gando, a manager from France over in Canada on a business trip. In a small town somewhere out west, he runs into young police officer Kate Logan, played by Bledel, who mistakenly arrests him, thinking he's a rapist the cops are seeking. Worried about her error, the officer seduces the Frenchman. Both Mitrani and Bledel made it clear, without providing plot-spoiling details, that this affair leads to no small amount of unexpected trouble for both of the characters.
Logan has just recently joined a small-town police force.
"She's new and has a lot to prove, and she definitely gives off an air that suggests that," said Bledel, who is most famous for playing Rory in the long-running TV series Gilmore Girls and has also starred in the films The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Sin City.
That insecurity partly explains why Logan freaks when she realizes she's arrested the wrong guy.
"She's very embarrassed," said Bledel. "She takes the mistake very hard. She's very hard on herself."
So she has some issues?
"That's correct," said Bledel. "She might not be wired correctly. That might be the best way to describe her without giving too much away. She's not necessarily what she seems."
Bledel said she had no hesitation about signing on to star in a low-budget Canadian film from a director who's pretty well unknown in the U.S.
"I grew up on foreign films and independent films," said Bledel, who was born and raised in Houston and has a globe-trotting heritage that includes Mexican, Danish and Argentinian roots. "We were always watching them in my house. So, yeah, it's comfortable for me. This is the kind of movie I'd like to watch. So this is, in a way, more comfortable than some big commercial movie."
The Kate Logan Affair will be released by Seville Pictures sometime in 2010.