love and social rights, same fight

THE OPINION OF “THE WORLD – TO SEE

First documentary feature film by Laurie Lassalle, Boom Boom, has the trappings of an obsession. In 2019, the young woman worked, Saturday after Saturday, to film the movement of “yellow vests” in Paris. More exactly, to follow Pierrot, a hairdresser in his thirties whom she fell in love with a few weeks earlier. Tattooed all over, spider web on his trachea and palm tree on his leg, Pierrot is a mainstay of the demo and wants to change a world that doesn’t want to change.

Presented as the diary of this budding idyll in times of social protests, Boom Boom recounts, in an unprecedented gesture, the feeling of exaltation common to love and insurrection. As a desperate adorer, Laurie Lassalle cuts through the crowd in search of her handsome kid then puts her camera on him for a long time without getting tired of his childish face and his sometimes talkative and hazy analyses, to bring out the incandescence of the heart and the people. . Its emotional bias thus sets it apart from the sociological and political approaches of the beautiful documentary. a people, of Emmanuel Gras, or I want sun, of the “rebellious” deputy François Ruffin and Gilles Perret (2019). It opens a vast field of reflection which begins with this question: what is the feeling of the riot?

Unspeakable fullness, the intoxication of being together, a turbine of hope… Animated by this formula from Simone Weil on the strikes of 1936 – “Regardless of the demands, this strike is in itself a joy. Pure joy. Unadulterated joy. » – Laurie Lassalle captures an emotional movement that distills a dose of adrenaline at each step to addict all who rub shoulders with it. A significant part of the interest of the film lies in its visceral way of making us feel these things. Amorous voice-over directly addressed to the chosen one of her heart, packets of close-ups on Pierrot and a few other companions, the curve of the jagged electrocardiogram recount the excitement of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées.

Pathos mixed with humor

Identity checks, tear gas bombs that go up your throat, LBDs that leave nasty wounds… One of the threads of the film remains the “catch me if you can” with the police, or in a sentimental lexicon, the “flee me, I follow you”. Pierrot is not reluctant to show his LBD injury, this hole in the leg whose strips he changes daily, right above his tattooed mini-palm tree. The absurd contrast between the wound and this little piece of paradise that smells like the holidays refers to something a little naive from which the film is never completely exempt, very cleverly arousing a pathos mixed with humor on what presents itself, between Pierrot’s leg hairs, like his Stations of the Cross and his dreams of little luxuries.

Regularly, Laurie Lassalle leaves the front to look up and film those who shoot videos from their balconies. With the difference that they watch overhanging while she fits here below alongside Pierrot. And then, as often, the passion runs out of steam and already Pierrot is elsewhere, perhaps towards another strike, another momentum, another attempt. He is about to leave, after a short break in the very chic Parc Monceau. Bourgeois truce a few streets from the defeated Champs-Elysées.