Here's a French comedy-drama mixing excellent elements with dubious choices, making its - not entirely assumed - absurdity. A cinema that plays hide-and-seek, echoing our masked faces in the cinemas of 2021. Atmosphere.
In theatres since the start of the reopening, it has won seven César awards (out of... twelve nominations!), including Best Film and Best Director, Farewell, suckers by Albert Dupontel tells the story of a forty-something hairdresser, Suze Trappet (Virginie Efira), who is diagnosed with a disease as rare as it is serious, limiting the rest and end of her life to a few months. We soon learn of a second tragedy, that of her birth under X when she was fifteen, forced by her parents to leave her son in the hands of the state, in secrecy.
It's easy to see that the film's plot will revolve around the search for her child, already well underway, before it's too late. But it's not long before the viewer is left with a feeling of unease: that of witnessing falsely «franchouillard» comic lines and behaviors at moments when there should be nothing but comedy. pathos. The result is a total absence of emotion: the audience doesn't even laugh or smile, but the presence of these markers in «don't forget I'm a comedy-drama, not a drama» mode removes from this same audience the memory of the attachment it had for the character and his poignant situation.
Case in point? The sequence in which the doctor delivering the bad news gets his patient's name wrong (Trappat, Trappit, Trappot, Trapput...). We've seen a finer way of denouncing the gap between the shock of such an announcement for the person receiving it and the routine of this announcement for the messenger. But it's when this joke (and we have to find out where the humour lies) is repeated a few minutes later in another office that we start to feel our masks scratching our skin and the moist heat of our confined faces emitting steam.
It's a pity, because the director's initial idea was excellent. As is the acting of Albert Dupontel, who plays the important role of JB, a fifty-something civil servant who teams up with the heroine for incongruous reasons. Excellent, so is the satire on the dysfunctions of state services that permeates the script. And the touching scenes in which Alzheimer's and blindness are added to this picture of protagonists who are certainly ill, but more alive than anyone else, are even more so.
Why, then, did we turn this feature film into such a mishmash, veering between the tedious and the poetic, and ending up with a low-key eulogy of love? The result of’Farewell, suckers a problematic sense of absurdity. Why problematic? Because Dupontel's (overly) numerous shifts are themselves at odds with this particular film. Virginie Efira, perfect as usual, just about saves the interest of a work that borders on a turnip. Ironically, she did not win the Best Actress award for which she had been nominated. The César awards for 2020 will have been questionable on many points.
Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com
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