Louis Garrel in the skin of Saint-Exupéry in the trailer for the film about the creator of “The Little Prince”

CINEMA – A journey worthy of Little Prince or from Night flight. This is what the first trailer promises Saint-Ex by Pablo Agüero, which will be released in theaters on December 11. In it, we discover Louis Garrel portraying Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who went in search of his friend and colleague Henri Guillaumet, played by Vincent Cassel.

The first images of the feature film, to see at the top of this articleshow the situation of the Compagnie Générale Aéropostale in 1930, when it faced competition from the railway network in Argentina. One of the pilots, Henri Guillaumet, then decides to cross the perilous Andes mountain range, before disappearing from radar. His lifelong friend, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, goes looking for him in the mountain range of South America.

For his film, Pablo Agüero partly adapts the story of the novel Land of men (1939), in which the airplane pilot recounts the adventures he experienced while searching for his fellow aviator. But the Argentinian director also drew on the genesis of Little Prince, that of the meeting between Saint-Exupéry and two young French girls who lived in Argentina, surrounded by animals including a fox (present in the trailer) and a snake. The aviator named them « princesses d’Argentine »10 years before the publication of this literary classic.

“It was a revelation. I decided to interweave these two stories and these two narrative registers: the adventure film where Guillaumet must be saved and the poetic film about experiences. confides Pablo Agüero in the production notes.

A story in the atmosphere of Little Prince

Unlike recent major productions inspired by true stories, the director sought to make 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”.

The filming, which lasted two years, took place from the summit of Aconcagua in Argentina to that of Fitz Roy in the extreme south of Patagonia, at the foot of the Saint-Exupéry peak. The shots are mostly filmed in the middle of winter “to capture these twilight glows that are only found near the poles and these snowstorms whose grain cannot be reproduced by any digital effect”, explain Pablo Agüero.

His feature film, which he himself describes as being “in a style close to Little Prince, as if Saint-Ex directed this film”, seeks to take the opposite view of “prosaic realism”. This is how the director says he wants to give shape to the dreams of this author and aviator whom he admires.

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