Edouard Baer brings together eight old glories of cinema at La Closerie des Lilas

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

Animator, actor, author, director, Edouard Baer cultivates under these various hats a persona that the public readily adopted: that of a casual, elegant and funny dandy who looks at his time with the distance necessary not to take it too seriously. The exercise is appreciable and pleasant, but inevitably exposes itself to a certain wear and tear, which Baer overcomes, precisely, by the versatility and finesse of his talent. Flirting with pataphysics and the absurd, loving the praise of the derisory and the mise en abyme of the bohemian-artistic milieu, displaying sumptuous castings subject to the regime of real or fictitious improvisation, his work as a director is unusual. and parsimonious (four feature films in twenty years since The Bostella in 1999).

Farewell Paris would he go too far in the fuzzy deconstructivist tendency of Edouard Baer? We are entitled to ask the question as it seems difficult to report the subject and to grasp the spirit. The best way to describe the film would be to pose it as close as possible to its device: Farewell Paris is a closed session that brings together eight old glories at La Closerie des Lilas, on the occasion of the deliberation of a worldly jury which awards a prize to a person who has done nothing all year. To enhance the Dadaist side of the affair, it is nothing less than Benoît Poelvoorde, François Damiens, Pierre Arditi, Daniel Prevost, Bernard Le Coq, Jean-François Stévenin, Jackie Berroyer and Bernard Murat who stick to it.

From which it follows almost nothing, if not the pleasure of seeing actors that we love thus united. For the rest: inept and metronomic outbursts of anger, laborious good words, circumstantial perfidy and annoyances, gamey good humor, actors who do not know what countenance to adopt, an author who himself does not seem to have resolved which way – between somewhat heartbreaking caricature and actual tenderness – its plot would lean. The impression, in a word, that it is all the same the work that has here, quite simply, failed.