Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: Michel Blanc in a caring film that does good this holiday season!
Between her obligations as mayor and her role as a teacher in the small village of Kerguen, Alice’s days are already busy. The arrival in his class of Emile, a sixty-year-old with an explosive character, finally decided to learn to read and write, will make his daily life unmanageable. Especially since Alice, who didn’t see anything coming, will also have to save her village and her school…
This is the pitch of the excellent comedy Les Petites Victoires, a funny, sensitive and moving film directed by the duo composed of Michel Blanc and Julia Piaton. A little nugget that does good and which attracted nearly a million spectators to French theaters.
Having grown up in a small town, director Mélanie Auffret wanted to evoke rurality and the phenomenon of desertification of villages with Les Petites Victoires. “The particularity of the phenomenon of desertification is that it causes other“, she notes.
“The flight of populations to large cities not only causes a loss of activity, but also a loss of social ties. First of all, it is businesses that close and move away, places of conviviality that become rarer, access to first aid which is restricted, then schools which close…”
Despite its serious subjects (the desertification of villages and illiteracy), Les Petites Victoires is a comedy. The director emphasizes: “However, it was important for me to stay within the codes of cinema that I love, namely comedy, where the subject, apparently light, still allows us to think. Because the film is based on characters positive, and also highlights the importance of doing things together.”
It is this combination that attracted Michel Blanc. “To counterbalance the deep and harsh side of the reality of illiteracy, we witness the parachute of a mature man into a class of kids between six and nine years old who, for the most part, are more advanced than him in learning reading”declares the actor. “This contrast is necessarily a source of comedy and it gave me the pleasure of playing with children.”
Tonight on Canal+ at 9 p.m.