Presented at the last Cannes Film Festival and in theaters this Wednesday, June 26, “The Plastic Guns”, the third film by Jean-Christophe Meurisse, also founder of the collective Les Chiens de Navarre, takes on the most infamous criminal case unresolved French story for a nasty and violent farce that questions our taste for blood. It’s not going to please everyone!
“We found him”, proclaims the poster of the Plastic guns, which features the hyper-realistic portrait of a hairy, bearded… and happy Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès. We must dare to refer to the most wanted man in France, suspected of the five-time homicide of his family and who disappeared in 2011.
Founder of the Dogs of Navarre
Founder of the madcap theatrical collective Les Chiens de Navarre, and already author of two amazing films, Apnea (2016) et Blood oranges (2021), Jean-Christophe Meurisse is not afraid of anything. He makes this known from the outset by opening his new film in a morgue on an open corpse above which two forensic pathologists talk about the public’s taste for violence and death. And to follow up with a super flattering portrait of Zavatta, according to them the best profiler in the world, who would have resolved the Grégory affair in two-two.
We discover said beast of a cop right away at the airport where he thinks he recognizes in Michel Uzès (Gaëtan Peau) leaving for Denmark, the famous Paul Bernardin who has been wanted for too long already for the assassination of his entire family. It turns out that Léa and Christine (Delphine Baril and Charlotte Laemmel), two self-proclaimed super friends “web investigators”, devote all their leisure time to tracking down the said suspect. The announcement that he would be on the side of Northern Europe puts them into hyperventilation, and nothing will be able to stop them! Meanwhile, somewhere in Argentina, a Frenchman, a certain Paul (Laurent Stocker), is about to start a new life with a beautiful woman…
It is urgent to laugh at everything
“I hurry to laugh at everything, for fear of being forced to cry.” If Jean-Christophe Meurisse necessarily knows the credo of Beaumarchais, his film Plastic guns on the other hand has nothing to do with The Barber of Seville! Adept at provocation and unease, absurd craspec and extreme burlesque, he questions here our fascination with news items, the entertainment that violence and the misfortune that mark it provide us, and the lessons from which we can draw about the human condition.
A host of hilarious appearances
It hurts, sometimes very bad. Not only because of the horror that is shown (although you should brace your stomach!), also for what it says about the monstrosity lurking within us. Beautifully packaged and less scattered than in his previous films, the story remains on the killer, the suspect and the investigators, defended by absolutely insane actors, while offering hilarious vignettes with the complicity of overheated apparitions (Romane Bohringer, Jonathan Cohen, Fred Tousch, Nora Hamzawi, Vincent Dedienne, Aymeric Lompret…).
So we’re having a blast but without losing the thread and even worse: seeing said thread attaching us to the protagonists, Bernardin included. However, we will not hide our relief that in the end, fiction surpasses reality!
