“Why are you smiling ?” is a type of “buddy movie” which immerses us in the skin of Wisi (Jean-Pascal Zadi), an idle young man. He arrives in Bordeaux in the hope of finding work, notably by auditioning for the main role of an opera, in vain, in the street he crosses paths with Marina (Emmanuelle Devos), a humanitarian with a big heart, and takes advantage of the situation to stay at her house, pretending to be a migrant. One evening, he meets her. Jérôme (Raphaël Quenard), himself on the street after the death of his mother, and also totally destitute because he is pathologically allergic to exercise (kopophobia for those in the know), and therefore quite logically at work The Pair of Arms. broken will then form an improbable trio with Marina, for better and for worse.
A comedy that is both funny and cringe-worthy.Why are you smiling ?” allows herself to laugh at (almost) everything without taboo, particularly current issues deemed sensitive. We think in particular of the sequence where Rita (Judith Magre), a rather embittered old woman, says everything she thinks without no form of restraint, which gives crude and comical situations with the protagonists of the story, allowing the directors to play with a few clichés. Indeed, engaged in the fight against political correctness, the duo of. directors trained by Christine Paillard and Chad Chenouga (“With all my strength“, “The main“) denounces in this film with humor the injunctions of a society in which everything is only first degree and polarization.
Beyond this aspect, “Why are you smiling ?” offers us beautiful moments of tenderness with a trio battered by life who will find, throughout the story, a real complementarity and mutual affection, and this despite the lies and unsaid. Jean-Pascal Zadi, Emmanuelle Devos and Raphaël Quenard demonstrate accuracy in their respective roles and the alchemy that operates between them allows the film to keep the viewer in suspense until the end.
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