Pablo Aguero’s biopic dedicated to the life of the writer and aviator, author of Land of men a you Little Princewill be released in theaters on December 11.
Land of Men, Night Flight, Southern Mail… The heroic life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which he wonderfully recounted in his books, deserved to have a film dedicated to him. While waiting for the theatrical release of the biopic Saint-Ex by Pablo Aguero on December 11, a trailer has just been revealed in which we recognize Louis Garrel in the role of the aviator writer and Vincent Cassel in that of Henri Guillaumet, one of the pioneering pilots in the history of French aviation.
The scenario of Saint-Ex takes us back to the year 1930, when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry set out in search of his friend and model, Henri Guillaumet, who disappeared during a dangerous mission where he was to fly over the Andes. The first extracts from the trailer highlight in a few short seconds the competition between Aéropostale and traditional means of transporting mail such as train and road. To prove the effectiveness of emerging aviation in this field, the pioneers, Saint-Exupéry and Guillaumet were then ready to take the wildest risks, flying over deserts and mountains, ignoring the weather conditions which were then unpredictable. .
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Pablo Aguero’s film is partly adapted from Land of men (1939). In this autobiographical novel, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry recounts the rescue of his friend and mentor, Henri Guillaumet. The Argentine director also drew on the genesis of Little Princenotably with this meeting between Saint-Exupéry and two young French girls who lived in Argentina. The scene multiplies references to the 1943 book, with the presence of numerous animals including a fox and a snake, visible in the trailer. We learn that the aviator named these two young girls “ princesses d’Argentine », ten years before the publication of this work, today considered a classic of French literature. “ It was a revelation, confides Pablo Aguero in the production notes. Before adding, I decided to intertwine these two stories and these two narrative registers: the adventure film where Guillaumet must be saved and the poetic film about experiences.
Far from being a blockbuster, Saint-Ex claims to be a film “ intimate, with few characters, where wonder comes not from the ostentation of the means of production, but from the organic mystery of nature », Specifies the director. The filming, which lasted two years, took place in Argentina, from the summit of Aconcagua to that of Fitz Roy in the extreme south of Patagonia, to the foot of the Saint-Exupéry peak. The shots for the feature film were, for the most part, filmed in the middle of winter. Because Pablo Aguero’s objective was to “ capture these twilight glows that we only find near the poles and these snowstorms whose grain cannot be reproduced by any digital effect ».
