THE “WORLD” OPINION – A MUST SEE
In a country like France, which seems increasingly divided since Jacques Chirac launched the theme “social division”sociological comedy covers a very specific function. Not only to show that there are social classes, but also to try to reduce the distance that separates them, to find a common point between them, to promise a rapprochement, even a reconciliation.
In this unifying exercise, the effectiveness of which has already been proven by the Nakache and Toledano duo (Untouchable2011 ; The meaning of the party2017) and limits (A difficult year2023), the fourth feature film by Emmanuel Courcol (A triumph2021) doesn’t go too bad. It even shows the good performance of a general audience fiction without excess due to the clear writing in the lines at the height of the characters. Taking music as a playground, he is adept enough to inject a few touches of social determinism and class distinction, hinting at a kind of “Bourdieusism”. turn on.
World-renowned conductor Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) faints in the middle of rehearsal, suffering from leukemia that requires a spinal cord transplant. His search for a compatible donor leads him to discover not only that he was adopted, but that he had a brother who lived an entirely different social destiny. Jimmy (Pierre Lottin) is actually a canteen worker in the northern French town of Walincourt and plays the trombone as an amateur in the local brass band, which mostly plays Aznavour and Sardou.
The marrow transplant obviously serves as a pretext for another, far more acrobatic transplant between the two brothers and, through them, the environments they represent and their fields of cultural legitimacy. Because, having saved the life of the bourgeois, the prole will, in return, ask for his intervention to fish out the errant marching band and even, why not, to conduct it.
The friction of accents
The film starts from an enormous opposition between its two protagonists, one embodying great music, the other popular highlight, and whose mosaic immediately borders on a discovery. And yet the film is held together by its unbridled taste for characters and an acting direction that can be identified by the music of the words. Benjamin Lavernhe and Pierre Lottin thus engage in a friction of accents, one velvety Parisian, the other cheeky – a friction that clearly shows the extent to which bourgeois speech is not neutral, but equally “marked”.
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