Revealed by “Love is better for two” in 2010, Laurence Arné has today signed her first feature film: a story of a dysfunctional family that sets out on the road, with music and the influence of “Little Miss Sunshine.”
What does it talk about ?
When her son Henri threatens to go live with his father, Justine forcibly takes him on a road trip to the Atlantic coast with her new companion Ludo and her stepson Joseph. On the holiday agenda: unite your blended family at all costs! But very quickly the adventure goes off the rails and Justine becomes disillusioned. However, from this chaos a music group is gradually born, “The Hennedricks”, in which everyone unleashes their madness. Will this new complicity allow the atypical family to finally find harmony?
Very Bad Road Trip?
Laurence Arné director: first? Yes and no. If she had participated in the production of the comedy film Girls of Today, The Hennedricks Family is her baptism of fire solo behind the camera. Alongside her companion Dany Boon, who directed her in several of her films (La Ch’tite famille, 8 rue de l’Humanité) and to whom she returns the favor today. And his couple, in a way, inspired this feature film. To talk about family reconstitution.
And this is how she chose to embrace the notion of dysfunctionality: “Which means that as adults, we have broken down the barriers of social conventions, we have freed ourselves”she said in the press kit. “I myself had experienced a first family failure, I didn’t want to fail in the second!”
“This is Justine’s starting point: she feels guilty about the separation from her son’s father, so she will do everything to repair it and help him find the desire to be a family again, differently, even if it means take her by force on this road trip, on the road to her childhood for which she is totally nostalgic.”
I myself had experienced a first family failure, I didn’t want to fail in the second!
And, of course, when we talk about road trips and dysfunctional families, it’s hard not to think of the yellow van from Little Miss Sunshine. Which, unsurprisingly and in the same way as Rain Man or CRAZY, was one of Laurence Arné’s references for The Hennedricks Family, and in several aspects.
Of the picture (“I wanted this warm and reassuring light”) to one of the teenagers that the filmmaker wanted to be close to the one played by Paul Dano in Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, through the approach to the subject: “I love the family dynamics that these films promote and the madness of certain psychological profiles. It’s funny, inventive and always so accurate and moving. And then I love this Anglo-Saxon culture.”
Gaumont Distribution
Unlike the directors of the feature films from which she draws inspiration, she plays one of the main roles alongside Dany Boon (very fair, with an often restrained score). And everything she had to deal with behind the scenes helped her character: “Having a thousand things to manage, like Justine, certainly helped me to better cope with the mental load.”
With pride of place given to music (and a pan flute used for unexpected covers), The Hennedricks Family thus has an energy close to that which the actress had demonstrated until now. And this road trip which comes at the right time for the holidays is all the more eventful, without forgetting to pack some emotion into its trunk.