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It’s summer. A family of average French people leaves the holiday highway to stop in a Zadist community. Jeanne, the mother, a super bobo young woman (Célia Rosich), was invited by her former yoga teacher, one of the founders of the movement. Victor (Eric Judor), the father, a computer scientist, follows her backwards, while their pre-teen daughter freaks out at the idea that she will have to leave her iPhone at the entrance to the camp, as the charter of the zone without waves requires it.
Far from the abstract idiocy of Only Twoor even The infernal Montparnasse Tower, Problems seduced by the way he has to fit squarely into a reality that is both mediatised, polarizing and rarely supported by fiction. The authors, Eric Judor, Noé Debré, screenwriter close to Jacques Audiard, and Blanche Gardin, are inspired by the spirit of the times (they say they have frequented Nuit Debout). By plunging a family subject to the norms of the consumer society into this community of odds and ends (the old green hippie, the vindictive feminist, the pseudo-shaman, the former jihadist…), they offer themselves a field of comedy fertile.
Hobbesian fable
Anti-globalization folklore serves as the backdrop for a series of gags that essentially aim for the spirit of seriousness and the judgmental tone of militant rhetoric. Between the “group of discussion on the rules”, this “child” who remains free to determine his gender, the obligation to address animals politely and, more generally, the ambient lexical terrorism, we laugh a lot in the first part of the film, which sets the scene.
By a smartphone smuggled in by a nice girl passionate about reality TV, we learn after a few days that a pandemic has ravaged the bulk of the world’s population. The news is like an electric shock. While the area remains miraculously spared from the virus and its inhabitants find themselves tasked, by force of circumstances, with rebuilding a civilization, the masks fall off, and the film takes the turn of a Hobbesian fable in which the instinct of conservation, the desire for property, the will to power brush aside the beautiful collectivist and pacifist principles around which the group was formed.
If this vision of human nature does not doubtless testify to a mad belief in utopia, it would be inappropriate to see in it a desire to denigrate the action of collectives in struggle. By putting back to back the despotic feminist played by Blanche Gardin and this Victor whose spinelessness badly conceals a predatory background (whom Eric Judor, with his malice, miraculously manages to make sympathetic), she takes more or less the freedom to have fun with them.
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