'An anonymous hero: sex and terrorism for a graceless French vaudeville

2023-01-20T16:15:04.491Z

Prejudices, including those of the viewer, are part of this bizarre and crazy political comedy directed by Alain Guiraudie

We know that humor does know borders, and perhaps that explains the strangeness caused by the latest film by French director Alain Guiraudie, which only works from a distance that invokes a cinema that plays with the weapons of reality as a source of perplexity and absurdity. .

An anonymous hero

is a sexual and political comedy woven from a naturalism that, at times, purely crude, is too thick and unsympathetic.

The virtues of a gaze as sharp and free as Guiraudie's are evident: his work with the actors and the provincial environment that he portrays are very accurate;

the ambiguity of how we perceive the characters, too.

But it's hard to digest his crazy side of comedy with no concessions to laughter.

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"Before I didn't film sex out of fear and laziness"

The story is set in a French provincial town, Clermont-Ferrand, where a bland, bald, paunchy computer scientist (Jean-Charles Clichet) falls in love with a veteran prostitute accustomed to the beatings of her pimp husband, and played brashly by actress, writer and director Noémie Lvovsky.

In her first sexual encounter, with the television on, a breaking news interrupts the unbridled orgasm of Isadora, the prostitute: a terrorist attack has just disrupted the quiet life of the city.

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The director of the celebrated

homoerotic

thriller
El desconocido del lago

(2013) ―his only film to be released in Spanish commercial circuits (although the Filmoteca Española dedicated a complete cycle to it four years ago)― sticks to his main character to move along two parallel paths that have not yet merged, the one about the relationship with Isadora and the one about the neighborhood ladder where a young North African man asks for refuge hours after the attack.

The conversations on that staircase are the caricature of a French society that is torn between racist instinct, reason and paranoia, while the sex between the protagonist and Isadora responds to an approach to desire from an unusual place, that of two bodies. common united by the singular bond of this comedy with such a particular and strange tone.