THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
Since French comedy is fueled by verbal humor under the double patronage of the TV sketch and the stand-up, we can count on the fingers of one hand what remains of truly burlesque filmmakers, whose gags borrow from the physical register. , upset the image and the sound. Antonin Peretjatko, 47, revealed in 2013 with The Girl of July 14 after a string of short films, is one of them, with a zany orientation that leads him to look at present-day France behind the magnifying glasses of the clownish farce.
His films always start from an openly absurd premise. In The Girl of July 14, the government was cutting back the one-month vacation to fight against the economic crisis. In The law of the jungle, a minister proposed to revive tourism in Guyana by launching the site of a ski slope. The patch perhaps goes even further: an ultrarich ventures into the metro and meets a modest young girl. Suddenly, reputedly watertight social classes align themselves like the planets: we have just entered the fourth dimension.
Paul (Philippe Katerine), heir to the industrial dynasty of Château-Têtard and grand dadais with unctuous manners, therefore married the petulant Ava (Anaïs Demoustier), RATP teller on the sidelines. The young woman then bursts into a strange and entrenched world, with obsolete codes, retrograde manners, in the place of a sumptuous mansion in the 16th arrondissement.e arrondissement of Paris, cut off from the street by high partitions. Immediately, the newcomer comes up against the hostility of her mother-in-law, Adelaide (Josiane Balasko), known as “the Queen Mother”, who, from her wheelchair, reigns authority over the house and presides over her destinies. The matron takes a very dim view of this low-level daughter-in-law, such as the fact that she goes about leisure walks all day, suspecting her of hiding a lover somewhere rather than giving the family an heir.
Poetic projections
Inspired by a short story by playwright Noëlle Renaude published in the 1980s, The patch automatically fits into a genre more agreed and marked out than Peretjatko’s previous films, namely vaudeville. In the trinity of husband, wife and lover, the troublemaker injects a scathing dose of eccentricity, topped by a whimsical voice-over, which irresistibly leads him towards a satire of the dominant social classes. The readily obsolete aspect of the film, with its bourgeois Paris, its clear line and its shimmering colors, is only an illusion destined to facilitate the return of the contemporary by delirious puffs, which every time derail the picture. And this from the opening: a hunting scene where the Château-Têtard parents kill off by shooting their own servants in yellow vests. Or later Paul retracing for Ava the history of the family industry (elevators and wheeled suitcases) having taken advantage of the period of the Occupation, then of its close relations with less frequent heads of state like Pinochet. A home-made freight elevator relieving the central staircase proudly bears the dictator’s name!
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