OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
Nice idea to film Paris in almost unknown territory, without cobbled streets or monuments on the horizon. From the first images, Jacques Audiard’s film, The Olympics, title borrowed from the multicultural district of 13e district of the capital, installs a little air of strangeness. The geometric lines of the towers of buildings intersect with the traffic ramps, an abstraction effect enhanced by black and white and night lights. A wide shot reveals the roofs of the shops in the shape of a pagoda, while the square windows of the apartments, like one another, form a checkerboard from which escapes an aerial feminine song. Checkers or chess, the game is about to begin …
Audiard seeks to decode the language of love, to name the feelings
In this case, it is a karaoke. A young naked woman on a sofa holds a microphone. When the song ends, to make her boyfriend laugh, Emilie (Lucie Zhang) takes on the suave voice of a flight attendant and mimics a commercial exchange with a client. She is a telephone advisor and sells telephone packages. Although a graduate of Sciences Po, Emilie lets herself be carried away by odd jobs. She is also looking for a roommate. Camille (Makita Samba), a young history teacher who is preparing for the aggregation, responds to the ad. Very pragmatic, Emilie asks him for details about her private life. What will be the intensity of the parade in the three-piece? “I compensate for my professional frustration with intense sexual activity”, answers the young man, setting the scene for the film. The practical work is not long. Emilie and Camille make love, very hard. She falls in love, he doesn’t. End of the story. They continue to live together, but Emilie dictates the new rule: “We no longer walk around naked in the apartment. ”
The Olympics, adapted from three new graphics by Adrian Tomine, shakes up the codes with its freshness of tone, its romantic discourse in the age of dating sites and its procession of young actors: Lucie Zhang, Makita Samba, singer Jehnny Beth, Camille Léon-Fucien, Océane Caïraty (also a footballer), Noémie Merlant being the best known – revealed in Portrait of the girl in fire (2019) by Céline Sciamma – who co-wrote the screenplay for Olympics with Jacques Audiard and Léa Mysius. The circle is complete.
A beautiful denial
Bringing out talents, turning the wheel of French cinema is a (stimulating) constant for Jacques Audiard, a regular at Cannes, where he created a shock with a prophet (2009), before winning the Palme d’Or in 2015 with Dheepan. The director is also one of the rare male filmmakers to have denounced the low presence of women in major festivals, in 2018, at the Venice Mostra, where the competition then showed only one female director among the 21 filmmakers – in 2021, the Cannes competition does little better, with four women (Catherine Corsini, Mia Hansen-Love, Julia Ducournau and Ildiko Enyedi) in a total of 24 films.
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