Awarded two acting prizes (for Louise Massin and Oussama Kheddam) and the best screenplay prize at the La Rochelle Fiction Festival 2022,
Loulou
is originally a web series, the two seasons of which tell the story of unwanted pregnancy. , then the first three years of life as the mother of a slightly lost thirty-something.
A girl who is not very equipped, emotionally dependent, with no particular ambition.
In short, the story of complicated parenthood.
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Except for this detail, not the least, that Loulou, despite his fears, his clumsiness and his shortcomings, has three best friends ready to do almost anything to help him.
Better, it is only joy, love and creativity.
Launched in 2017 on Arte.tv and enthusiastically received at many festivals, the small series - 21 episodes of around 6 minutes - hit the mark.
To the point that Arte decided to extend it with this fiction.
Created and written by the same people, including Émilie Noblet and Louise Massin, at the origin of the project, the story picks up where it left off in the web series.
A fresh, touching and funny story
Alex is now 10 years old.
The unconditional love he has for his mother clashes with the thoughts of his classmates, the broken promises, the oddities, the little frustrations, the ideal picture offered by the new family his son is starting. dad.
Alex rebels.
Loulou collapses.
She is more convinced than ever that she is a bad mother.
The TV film, precisely, seeks to demonstrate the opposite.
Also read: With Loulou and À la joie, Arte reigns on the charts of the La Rochelle Festival
Without activism, without judgment, without particular demands, without a harsh look at the men who are so fashionable at the moment, she shows to what extent Loulou does the best she can with what she has.
“She’s struggling, but she’s not complaining.
She resists a world full of injunctions, particularly regarding femininity and motherhood
,” explains her interpreter.
Before adding:
“I like that its trajectory does not follow a set path.
»
What emerges is a fresh, touching, funny story.
The gags are childish.
Some situations are literally improbable.
But the interactions are fine.
They give rise to so many tasty dialogues.
They all express the difficulty of being oneself and even more so of being a parent.
And paint a colorful portrait of what the English child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott defined in an essay published in the early 1950s as “the good enough mother” (The Good Enough Mother).
And it feels really good.
Web series are to television what short films are to cinema.
Early works, school films, experiences, an astonishing mode of expression.
Loulou
, a small web series, has become big.
The TV film, by Émilie Noblet, to whom we also owe episodes of
Parliament
, of
HP
, the crazy medical series from OCS (and who will soon sign
Zorro
with Jean Dujardin), has everything of a cinema film.
A French gem made with next to nothing but each shot illustrates the mastery of image, light and colors.
An unpretentious friends film, without a house in Cap-Ferret and which is not there to make us take out our little tissues.