THE “WORLD” OPINION – A MUST SEE
After the death of his daughter, Raoul (Christophe Paou), in his fifties, goes to Marseilles to follow in her footsteps and pick up the pieces of a life he knows nothing about. In his sometimes futile, often alcoholic wanderings, he discovers that his daughter, Agnès, who has died of an overdose, has lied to him from start to finish about her sane life as an employee in a law firm. In fact, he was an active member of the underground rock scene and devoted his life to parties, drugs and his garage band Fotogenico.
Angry, Raoul plays their vinyl on loop while clinging to the soles of Agnès’s friends, who look like they’re straight out of a comic strip: it’s Tina (Angèle Metzger), a record saleswoman with Ziggy Stardust. Lala (Roxane Mesquida), the waitress who doesn’t take off her skates, not even in bed, and Brune (Bella Baguena), the tall Spanish rod. Raoul pesters him with questions, gets drunk, wanders the city, sleeps where he can, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but no doubt he will be able to go no further than this sentence, dropped in the middle of his wanderings: “Marseille, my daughter swallowed. »
Presented this year in Cannes at ACID, Photogenic is the first feature film by Marcia Romano, a prolific screenwriter for French cinema (See Paris again, The event), and Benoît Sabatier, a valuable rock critic who worked for a long time for the magazine Technikart. Looking at their film, we think of another one: hardcore (1979), by Paul Schraderthe story of a good Calvinist father who scours the bad corners of Los Angeles looking for his missing daughter.
A slightly wild, broken movie
Another era, other customs, but the principle is the same: take an old man, put him in a world of young people and annotate all the oddities, misunderstandings, frictions that arise from this clash. Superb performed by Christophe Paou honest and with a repressed sadness, Raoul is the obvious extension of the two directors’ gaze: an alien, aging body intruding on a small subterranean milieu populated by strange girls and chance encounters – the film, which feels, feeds on what he finds there.
Marcia Romano and Benoît Sabatier enjoy filming their actors as much as contemplating the locations: a record store, an underworld club, a beach bar with soft drinks, dirty streets littered with trash or scooters. Nothing here is clean or appears to be decorated for filming purposes. It is thus the sensuality of places that remains intact: the way we live there and the way we practice them. No doubt it took a slightly wild, broken film, shot in twenty-three days, to capture this underrepresented side of Marseille, a city caricatured a thousand times over, captured here as a playground, and dirty and electrified, a bohemian utopia for penniless artists.
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