Alain is the type of man to say, without laughing: “I will rest when I am dead”. The kind of man who is too busy to support his daughter, who is studying political science. The kind of man who doesn’t say thank you, doesn’t take the time, doesn’t know how to live.
Alain is a star in the business world, about to launch a new electric car model. But all this quickly vanished when, after two consecutive strokes, he struggled to regain language and memory, despite the help of a young speech therapist.
How to find the north?
Illness as revealing of a life filled with emptiness and omnipresent work so that the essential has not taken the edge? A Man in a Hurry is certainly not the first film to venture into these lands.
Patients (Large Sick Body) or Untouchables (Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano) were basically talking about the same thing. But A man in a hurry also has a major asset to stand out, in this role completely rewritten for him: Fabrice Luchini.
Is Luchini capable of playing everything?
Whether he plays a tender or an odious person, a talkative or a silent one, a cerebral or a physical one, Luchini, it is impossible to deny, carries with him a presence and a charisma that is difficult to resist. A charm, even. Or, in any case, a humanity which allows, even when he plays men as unlovely as this Alain, to become attached to him. It’s not nothing.
Because it took talent and confidence so that Alain’s speech difficulties, tragic as well as crazy, did not become laughable, but on the contrary a source of a new eloquence, fanciful and moving. Even more was needed for his reconnection to the essential – to love, quite simply, without worrying about making the front page of magazines or winning over his competitors – to be credible and not flirt with angelism.
A world of work that takes but gives nothing back
Of course, the fact that the story ofA man in a hurry is adapted from a true story – that of the boss of Peugeot Citroën, Christian Streiff, who transformed his experience into a book – further helps to find this film touching. Especially since he captures quite well the cruelty of this industrial world, to which many sacrifice a lot, but which ultimately gives quite little. And if we might find the last third a little less rhythmic, the character of Alain’s daughter a little too secondary, or even that of the speech therapist in search of her origins (Leïla Bekhti) a little underdeveloped,
the Luchini magic works. This is certainly the characteristic of great actors.
A man in a hurryto see on HERE TV Sunday October 13, at 11:25 p.m.
The trailer (source: YouTube).
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