French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has announced he is adapting bestselling novel Changer l’eau des fleurs by Valérie Perrin, with Leïla Bekhti in the lead role as a beloved cemetery caretaker with a tragic backstory.
The Oscar-nominated Amélie director unveiled details of the project in an exclusive interview with French magazine Paris Match.
Italian company Palomar acquired adaptation rights to the novel in 2021 and is leading the production with Paris-based 24 25 Films (Barbès, Little Algeria and Visions), both of which are Mediawan companies.
Studiocanal is co-producing and will also distribute the film in France and handle international sales, while Canal+ and Netflix are backing the production.
Changer l’eau des fleurs, which translates as “changing the flower water”, revolves around a woman called Violette Toussaint who is the caretaker for a cemetery in a small town in Burgundy.
Violette is at the heart of this small world, populated by the local gravediggers and a young priest as well as the many visitors, who stop by her lodge and confide in her about their lives and lost ones.
As she listens to these stories, some tragic, some comic, and reflects on questions of life, death, grief and the simple joys of life, her own painful backstory is revealed through a tragicomic prism.
“She is a character filled with light, even for me who does not have a peaceful relationship with death,” Bekhti told Paris Match. “She is timeless, resilient. I like these characters who are extremely unique and at the same time who speak to you. There is nothing more beautiful and more poetic than seeking life through death.”
The novel was first published in 2018 in France, where it has sold 850, 000 copies, and has since been translated into 28 languages.
It is the second literary work of novelist, screenwriter and photographer Perrin, who also co-wrote a number of screenplays with husband Claude Lelouche for his films, including We Love You, You Bastard (2014), Un + Une (2015) and The Best Years of a Life (2019).
Jeunet, who has adapted the novel for the big screen, told Paris Match that while the novel had a poetic and fantastical edge, he was not planning to visualize this directly on the big screen as he had done in Amélie with scenes such as that of her heartbeat.
“But there are elements that already excite me before I shoot them,” he said. “When Valérie writes that death is like a dog slaloming between our legs, ready to bite us at any moment, I immediately visualize how I am going to put this into images.”
He suggested, however, that his approach would be more simplistic with this film saying he had taken inspiration for tone from Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1958 Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Cranes Are Flying.
Changer L’Eau Des Fleurs is due to start shooting in May 2025.
