With a large hat on her head, a devastating smile and rosy cheekbones, the actress Marilu Marini appears and with her comes this “remarkable woman” that director Sandrine Dumas films so well in a delicate and joyful documentary: Marilu. Meeting with a remarkable woman, in theaters Wednesday April 24. From 2016 to 2022, Sandrine Dumas followed her heroine on each side of the Atlantic. One foot in France and the other in Argentina, where the actress was born in 1940. And where she lived until 1975, before taking the plane to flee, 35 years old, the violence of a dictatorship suffered in his flesh: twenty-five days of isolation for showing his navel in public. Locked in a cell too low to stand up, Marilu Marini made roses with breadcrumbs to, she tells us, “do not sink into despair”.
She who danced on the stages of Buenos Aires landed in Paris never to leave and learn French there even if she dreams in Spanish. She comes to join the “gang of Argentinians”. A troupe of fellow artists, also emigrants, and who, like her, want to break the codes of representation with a lot of flashy aesthetics. Gathered around the director Alfredo Arias, the exiles of the TSE group break into the French landscape with sensuality, excess and arrogance.
Clown and tragedian
“We shared our youth, indifferent to the moral order,” says the actress who has always been driven by a desire for emancipation. Already as a teenager, she had refused to be “the girl from a good family” that his parents dreamed of. Escaping the petty bourgeoisie, escaping military repression, sending borders and frames flying: she opts for the life of an artist, synonymous with perpetual movement and free flights into poetic spheres. : “What terrifies me is not moving internally”she explains when we meet her one cool spring morning.
To avoid falling into immobility, Marilu Marini works. The work is “present every second”, she confides. Since her debut in 1968, she has performed in nearly fifty shows, including around twenty with Alfredo Arias, a long-time accomplice until their professional separation in 2008: “I needed another world. » Need, no doubt, to put an end to the creatures of Arias for good, including the iconic Woman sitting (the text was by Copi), which nourished the legend of the weekly The new observer before conquering the theater stages.
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