THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
When the low-fire cinema of Sébastien Betbeder meets the glowing gaze of Jonathan Capdevielle, performer and auscultator of human madness, the pot begins to overflow with strange liquids: at the table the zombies! Everything scampers off, the eighth feature film by the director born in 1975, is a road movie in a white zone, in a rural France that is now only a shadow of itself. Watcher of Lost Souls – 2 autumns, 3 winters (2013), The Journey to Greenland (2016), Standing on the mountain (2019), sad planet (2021) –, Betbeder inscribes, as often, his fiction in reality.
With, in this film, the presence of the former candidate for the municipal election of Amiens (Somme), in 2014, Nicolas Belvalette, known as “Used”: the musician and singer had then founded the Party without target – and sensitive –, whose dada and wacky program had collected just over 2% of the votes in the first round. Betbeder had already filmed the dandy artist, blonde lock across his face, in a previous short film, to the bone (2019).
In Amiens, precisely, Thomas (Thomas Scimeca) works as a freelancer in the local press and his editorial staff asks him to produce the portrait of Used, on the theme: what has become of the former candidate? Thomas complies, but the interview is cut short, and Usé takes the journalist on a night out. The two accomplices are not long in discovering a man who lies in the middle of the garbage cans, his head bloody. His heart seems to have stopped, yet he moans and ends up getting up: here is Jojo (Jonathan Capdevielle) in his black jacket. He is a little scary, and especially pity. The two thirty-year-olds bring the “miracle” back to his younger sister, Marilou (Léonie Dahan-Lamort). There are now four of them, and they can’t leave each other, for the simple reason that Jojo seems to fade away and die as soon as Thomas pretends to walk away. Before resuscitating, Christlike and frightened face.
libertarian vein
The little band doesn’t really have a goal, as in The Valseuses (1974), by Bertrand Blier. In Everything scampers off, Betbeder digs another libertarian vein, not sex, but a new way of being together. The director cites among his references Full of super (1976), by Alain Cavalier, a well-found title in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis.
From the ribbon of bitumen to the biture, the improbable side of the situations generates beautiful bifurcations
In 2022, Jojo the living dead, driven by his bizarre intuitions, becomes the driving force of the story, unearthing an empty bourgeois house in the middle of the forest. The quartet lives on stolen moments, sweet-crazy moments in a hallucinated chase. The actors excel in their portrayal of losers disconnected, in every sense of the word: Capdevielle doesn’t pick up anything, Scimeca does its bit, but nothing to do, no network, they are alone in the world, and very happy to have found each other.
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