Laure Calamy, a mythomaniac with a thousand faces in “A devoted friend”

During the opening night of the La Rochelle Fiction Festival, Sophie Révil, the president of the 2024 edition, mistakenly announced the presence of Laure Calamy in the credits of the series scheduled for that evening, Children are kingsprompting laughter from the audience and sarcasm from the comedian on duty, Antonia de Rendinger.

The actress was in the credits “only” in two of the programs presented this year in La Rochelle, the feature film – we say “unitary”, in the jargon of the audiovisual industry – I won’t let this happen againby Gustave Kervern, soon to be broadcast on Arte, and A devoted frienda four-episode miniseries, the first French production of the Max platform, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will be released on October 11.

A devoted friend fictionalizes the story of Alexandre Kauffmann, The Bataclan Mythomaniac (Goutte d’Or, 2021), which traced the construction and collapse of the lie of Florence M., who had passed herself off as a victim of the attacks of November 13, 2015 before being sentenced to prison in 2018.

From this bulimia of roles which has made her omnipresent since the series Ten percent revealed it to the general public and to casting directors, in the middle of the 2010s, Laure Calamy says, laughing, in the course of the conversation, that she remains “an old intermittent worker who is afraid” of not working enough. But she is not here to talk about herself. In a duet with Alexandre Kauffmann, who collaborated on the screenplay ofA devoted friendshe wants to present this mini-series, directed by the filmmaker Just Philippot (The Cloud, Acid), which challenges the viewer to take an interest in a character with no other quality than an overflowing imagination. Guilty, as Just Philippot said at the press conference preceding the interview, of a “a stab in the social contract”.

Laure Calamy sees herself more as “a shrink” than as a defense attorney. She draws attention to “the desire to succeed in life” of his character, who has gone from failure to failure, and who sees in his fraudulent insertion within an association of victims of the attacks the opportunity for a “an adventure that allows her to achieve, to be recognized, looked at, and to relieve the pain of others”. Like his real-life model, Chris (that’s the character’s first name) also took advantage of the situation to obtain compensation. Speaking to Alexandre Kauffmann, Laure Calamy reminds him: “You think that it was later that she became interested in money. She lived in precarious conditions. We’re not going to excuse her, but, in any case, I embody her…”

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