Sophie Marceau writes about her years with Zulawski in a sad and dark Warsaw

Paris. Sophie Marceau was seventeen when she fell in love with Andrzej Zulawski. She was still a starlet, the dreamy teenager from "Le Temps des cerises"; he was the scandalous intellectual, censored in Poland and exiled to France in search of freedom, the director of "L'important c'est d'aimer", a poignant melodrama starring Romy Schneider and Klaus Kinski. “We spent seventeen years together, made four films and had a child together. I cannot reduce our life to a limited period, to a single shelf on a film buff’s bookshelf under the letter Z of your name. It feels as though I’ve lived a whole lifetime with you,” writes Sophie Marceau in *Warszawa* (Seghers), the French actress’s third book – a long love letter to Andrzej Żulawski, who was her mentor and partner for sixteen years (from 1984 to 2001), and with whom she had her only son, Vincent, in 1995.

The life Marceau describes is a world away from Paris: it is set in communist Poland in the 1980s, in Warsaw, in the outlying district of Ursynów, where the director had a flat to which he had regained the right of occupancy after having lent it to a member of his family for twenty years. This situation stemmed from the administrative practices of the communist era, which allowed people to benefit from the right to occupy state-owned accommodation. “You agreed, not without some reservations, to take advantage of the benefits of Marxist philosophy and moved there for the first time. With me,” writes the actress.

The daughter of a veteran of the Algerian War who worked as a lorry driver and a mother employed in a shopping centre, Sophie Marceau grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris, amongst council flats and wasteland, a far cry from the image of the middle-class woman in "Le Temps des cerises". “I had no records, no music, no books, no cinema – I had nothing of the world. We were street children; we played outdoors, and I loved it – I felt very much at ease wandering about outside in my slippers,” she told France Inter.

When she arrived in Warsaw before the fall of the Wall, it came as a shock. “Everything was dark, sad and dirty. There were no colours, no light; I was left with the image of a flat, lifeless city,” says the actress, recalling the practical hardships of daily life: “We always had to go and fetch water from the spring.” Travelling in Fiat 500s – nicknamed ‘yoghurt pots’ in Poland – residents would sometimes wait up to two hours to return home with two fifteen-litre jerrycans.

But Sophie Marceau also recalls with emotion “all that resistance, those people who were suffering but trying to keep fighting against the communist yoke”. And who, in 1989, thanks to Solidarność, would regain their freedom. In Warsaw, Marceau shot her first film, a short film entitled L’Aube à l’envers, inspired by Paul Verlaine’s poem of the same name, but which, she says, is in fact the “synthesis” of her relationship with Andrzej Zulawski.