THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
At a time when auteur cinema is struggling to find its audience, isn’t it a little suicidal to call your film this way: “This music does not play for anyone”? Here is the first question we ask ourselves about Samuel Benchetrit’s new opus.
Afterwards, we look at the colorful cast with still dumbfounded eyes. Then we watch the film itself, and we say to ourselves that we don’t really see why we would resist a proposal as nice and sticky as this one.
Faithful to a surrealistic vein that succeeds him, this prolific storyteller (in literature, in cinema, in the theater) invents for his seventh feature film (since Janis and John, in 2003) a three-stripe story.
Settled like music paper
Here, Jeff (François Damiens), the leader of a gang of prolos-dockers-mafia in a port city, married to a catatonic woman stunned by cathodic reality TV, falls head over heels in love with the young cashier of a great area. Enrolled in a writing workshop, he had one of his henchmen send her poems (Ramzy Bedia), which she returned to him each time because of their lack of readability.
The charm of the film lies in the idea that tough guys harbor so much tenderness in them, but works more essentially on the arbitrary distancing of causes and effects.
At the same time as this first plot, another henchman (Gustave Kervern) of the leader’s mission is to make a bad payer throat the money he owes. Falling on his wife (Vanessa Paradis), a stammering theater actress who confesses to her having killed her husband by slapping him, he instantly falls in love with her and takes interest in the musical dedicated to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir which ‘she prepares.
Finally, two bosses thugs (Bouli Lanners and JoeyStarr) scour the school of the boss’s daughter, a little dumpy little appreciated by her classmates, to terrorize them and force them to go to the party she is preparing.
Mixing the threads of these three fairly bare plots without bothering to explain themselves, Samuel Benchetrit draws from them a refined and laconic fantasy, clinging to the cold light of the North, to which, even if one feels it regulated like music paper , we take pleasure in forgetting a little the reason for all things.
The charm of the film is, of course, the idea that tough guys harbor so much tenderness in them, but it works more essentially on the arbitrary distancing of cause and effect. Going to drive an ice ax into the skull of an individual and find yourself on stage with his wife. Place the heads of the high school students in a plastic bag to encourage them to go to a party. Explain the art of the Alexandrines to a few types that we undertake to slaughter. It is in the space left vacant, freely shared with the spectator, that the film takes place.
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