ASSOCIATION OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA FOR ITS DISTRIBUTION (ACID)
They are in their twenties, walk around their house in tap-dancing socks, can stay seated for a long time on an electrical cabinet on the edge of the forest and dream of pleasing girls by pulling out their Snapchat nickname or flaunting with their most beautiful football jackets. For one night, Renard, a fake blond, headband hanging on his forehead, who wears a banana slung over his shoulder, and his friend Leslie, enhanced with scattered mini-dreads on his head, go to survey a space that we see very little in cinema: peri-urban areas. This dive into what is neither frankly urban nor frankly rural, with all the hassle of transport that this can cause, will soon turn into a surreal road trip.
The plot starts quietly… Leslie takes her bowl of cereal in the kitchen of the family apartment in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis) when a mission calls her. For around twenty euros, he agrees to drop off a bag of drugs at the other end of Ile-de-France, in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse (Yvelines). His journey begins at the Pommiers-Cimetière bus stop, where he picks up his friend Renard. Metro, RER… The plan will turn out to be flawed: a technical problem on the line makes any return to the capital impossible. Our two beautiful kids are stuck for the night in La Hacquinière (Essonne), “La Hacq'”as they say in the area… Behind this unsuspected station name is emerging a new Eldorado.
A world in itself
As in his first short films (Holidays in Chellesin 2019, and The Blood of the Vein, in 2021), Martin Jauvat, 25, also an actor in the film, takes a tender and inventive look at the outer suburbs. At home, each pavilion, with its rooms of eternal teenagers, is experienced as a world in itself and composes a constellation of roughcast facades behind which strangeness can arise. From a cinematographic point of view, it is ultimately the opposite path to the representation of the nearby suburbs which works on a strongly identified imagination, where towers and blocks saturate the frames.
“Grand Paris” reveals a self-taught, resourceful and prodigiously clever filmmaker
Out on the road, Renard and Leslie discover a mysterious artefact on a construction site for the future Grand Paris Express line. Their treasure? A stone engraved with symbols that could be hieroglyphs, unless they are Sumerian characters or alien writing. Here, in this futuristic setting, like a tagged building site in open country, genre cinema enters the scene.
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