Director Ursula Meier Reflects on the Violence and Beauty of ‘The Line’

variety.com:

Ben Croll When developing films like 2008’s “Home” and 2012’s “Sister,” French-Swiss director Ursula Meier began by focusing on geography, imaging what stories may spring from a forgotten stretch of highway or how a remote mountaintop might shape the lives of those living upon it.

But when she began work on “The Line,” which premiered on Friday at the Berlin Film Festival, the filmmaker had a different terrain in mind.“The setting for this film would be the character’s body,” Meier tells Variety. “I wanted to follow a series of old scars that would retrace a troubled past, so that landscape would be the body itself and the story would be one of violence.”Indeed, violence was what drew Meier and the film’s co-writer and lead actor Stéphanie Blanchoud to the project. “We wanted to examine a violent woman,” Meier says. “The project really started from a shared observation that in cinema violent characters are young girls, or explored through the prism of drug addiction. [We wanted to change that,] so we began work on a film about a 35-year-old woman who is unable to express herself without losing control.” Together Meier and Blanchoud, who had trained in boxing for a play that she wrote, forged the latter’s character, Margaret, by focusing on her body. “We worked on her movements, on how she would walk,” the director explains. “We did make-up sessions and covered Stephanie’s face up with scars, and then used those photos when writing the script.” What emerged was a character with something electric inside her, full of steam and ready to pop.And pop off Margaret does, lunging at her mother, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, in a lacerating attack that opens the film.