THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
It is time for the writers to agree to formalize a sort of French feel-good movie charter, these feature films that come out with a banana or a peach, and sometimes both. The principle of the genre is simple: opposing personalities unite, at first reluctantly, for the happiness of one of them. Untouchables (2011) by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, who associated a rich white quadriplegic and his former convict of Senegalese origin, could pass for a model of the genre, a kind of matrix. By bringing together in the cinema nearly 20 million spectators, the martingale Omar Sy-François Cluzet gave ideas. Not always very good.
Fly Me takes up some of the binary codes of the original matrix (a white, a black; a rich, a poor; a young adult who struggles to realize himself and a precocious teenager), but nothing to do, the sauce does not take. The director, Christophe Barratier (The chorists, 2004), and his team of writers may multiply a few scenes where the two heroes are about to break up, nothing happens. No chills, no tears that bead, no hairs that stand up. Whose fault is it ? Has a story sewn with large stitches of white thread.
Mistrust, then complicity
After having smashed the garage door of the house of his father, an eminent specialist in rare diseases (Gérard Lanvin, to whom the roles of wise old man – gangster or benefactor – fit like a glove), and parked his convertible in the full pool, Thomas (Victor Belmondo, son of Paul and grandson of Jean-Paul) is ordered to make amends. Either his father cuts him off, or he agrees to take care of 12-year-old Marcus (Yoann Eloundou), a severely disabled young boy. Obviously, Thomas balks, preferring, at 26, girls and nightclubs. He has an excuse: his mother is dead … But a duet develops, first in mistrust, then in an astonishing complicity between two people that fourteen years separate.
This is where we come back to our idea of a charter. Because, beyond a certain threshold of plausibility, any attempt to create emotion becomes futile. That a daddy’s son comes to take charge of a multi-handicapped child (but full of vitality to comply with the adventures that the scenario subjects him to), still passes. May the patient be cured under the effect of the science of the father and the good humor of the son, so be it. Let him in his turn embark on medical studies to relieve the suffering of the world and his conscience, why not… On paper everything is good. But, even if the spectator does not balk at an easy emotion, it should not be taken for a nerd either.
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