THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
A frenetic, often disturbing surrealism guides the steps of Albert Dupontel. We therefore follow these films, which cultivate both mental and narrative eccentricity, as best we can, because we cannot pretend that letting ourselves be carried away by the whirlwind is enough to do so. There are films where we float happily (9 months firm2013, his most beautiful opus), others where, submerged, we sink irremediably. Second round, A strange film which combines philosophical ramming of an open door and confusing the plot, belongs to the second category.
Here’s the lowdown. Mademoiselle Pove (Cécile de France), a journalist who does not mince her words on a 24-hour news channel, copes with her boredom in the football section, where her freedom of speech has caused her to be transferred, in the company of her faithful cameraman Gus (Nicolas Married). As luck would have it, the removal of a colleague due to an attack against one of the presidential candidates puts her back in the saddle on the current campaign. She is tasked with following said candidate, the economist Pierre-Henry Mercier, who, by coincidence, was her high school classmate and, perhaps, the partner of her first kiss.
While her channel only requires the usual clichés from her, the journalist goes further into the mysteries of Mercier’s candidacy, which seems to be supported by a project which does not say its name, guided by a secret committee of thinkers enlightened, emancipated both from devices and from industry. Even more complicated, Mercier, raised in France by a possibly monstrous adoptive mother, seems to have a hidden twin brother, who would have been expelled as a child with their mother to Romania, where the latter would have quickly died.
Parody of television aesthetics
Stranger still, possibly, Mercier, seriously injured in the attack, has an Israeli bodyguard to whom he owes his life, and who exfiltrate him to the countryside where he will meet his brother for a transfusion sanguine, while being followed closely by the clever Miss Pove and the placid Gus.
All these oddities will not necessarily find very clear answers, depending on this story that is shaken like a salad bowl both in time and in space, and which does not seem to spare hypotheses (spy story, political film, family melodrama, etc.). ) only to better let them exhaust themselves. Phosphorescent image, incongruous zoological scenes, parody of television aesthetics, random flashbacks: these are far too many complications, if not for nothing, at least for the administration in extremis of a morality which, cheaply strangling the political-media system, advocates a new regime of representativeness, in which everyone would be appointed for what they really know how to do and would speak about what they know.
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