THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
In these times of epidemic and social crisis, well sheltered from platforms and their robots that tell us what to watch, cultural outings, once adventurous, are now only considered with certainty. Who, today, has the time, the desire, the taste to attempt a movement that does not go towards the recognition of what we are, of what we love? Who has, moreover, if only the financial means? Certain films, not identified, however invite to break this routine. Their share of uncertainty and improbability calls us. Such would be, in any case, the bet to be taken with Municipal, documentary fiction of a welcome freshness, open-air laboratory experience, first feature film by a young man whom we have never heard of, produced with the help of an actor whom we do not know much better.
Thomas Paulot imagined, in favor of the municipal elections of Revin, in the Ardennes, in 2020, to send there a “false” candidate, in the person of the actor Laurent Papot, who will in no way seek to conceal the singularity of the experience to which it lends itself. And, already, if only in the formulation that we find ourselves forced to use to present it, the device traps us and disconcerts us.
Because if it is not wrong to present him as a false candidate – in that he is paid to play this role in the film -, it is no less true that the dynamics of his candidacy – in that it gives him credibility, any actor he may be, as a fully-fledged actor in these elections – allows him to be defined as a real candidate. The late Raymond Devos would have enjoyed this film, whose imbroglio opens the mind to the four winds of freedom.
Honesty and humility
So Laurent – a tall dark man in his 40s, with a frank and friendly air – comes out one fine morning from a steel blue SNCF train in the fog of a French commune in the Grand-Est. The title of the film is inscribed in big bright yellow letters on this greyish postcard, like the graphic equivalent of the alchemical mixture that Thomas Paulot is cooking up for us. Papot, with the help of two accomplices, moved into the disused Celtic bar to make it his campaign headquarters. He gets his hands dirty. Haircut. Photo. Searching for a slogan for his poster.
This is how the film goes – between strength and weakness, belief and doubt, drawing its strength and its belief from the very admission of its weakness and its doubts.
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