it will happen near you
On October 11, 2019 at 8:44 p.m., France held its breath: Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, suspect number 1 in the murder of his wife and four children since 2011, had apparently been arrested at Glasgow airport. The media went crazy with special editions, experts took turns on the sets to imagine the sequence of events… Except that in the end, it was all just a mistake: wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. A golden subject for cinema that no one had yet taken up.
At least, before Jean-Christophe Meurisse decides to rely on this incredible story to create a sort of parody with Plastic guns. And that’s not really surprising coming from the filmmaker. His work has always had fun dissecting reality, perverting it… while demonstrating that reality was in truth sufficiently twisted for its caustic humor to be only the extension of a sick world.
So, Plastic guns follows Léa and Christine (a twisting duo formed by Delphine Baril and Charlotte Laemmel), two women obsessed with the Paul Bernardin affair, a man suspected of having killed his entire family and mysteriously disappeared. After receiving an honorary prize (grade 4 Facebook investigator), they go to investigate the house where the killing took place… except that at the same time, the media announce that Paul Bernardin has just been arrested in the North of Europe.
A nice project in perspective for Meurisse since with the affair of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès (alias Paul Bernardin here), he found the perfect material to continue to mocking the excesses of a society in distress. During its first part (let’s say until the arrival of the arc of the “real” Paul Bernardin), the film therefore unfolds its program with humor and relaxation.
French class
In skillfully playing with the absurdity of said reality, he delivers hilarious scenes (mocking amateur investigators swarming the Internet, ridiculing a famous inspector in front of his wife…), but also particularly worrying. This is particularly the case during the interrogation of Michel Uzès (excellent Gaëtan Peau) in Denmark with Commissioner Hammer, where despite the obvious confusion, everything becomes subject to justification for no reason. Wisely, Meurisse does not need to amplify the nonsense that surrounds us and ultimately leaves the situation to degenerate on its own.
That said, it only works at first, because as the story progresses, the film completely loses itself along the way. While the scenes naturally exposed the nonsense of the world, Dies from overdoing it by falling into the same faults as his Blood oranges. The characters’ descent into pure madness-stupidity-dementia, as if to materialize the “disgusting beast” that is in each of them, is unwelcomely gratuitous (a scene with eyes or a murderous flashback is frankly useless).
So of course, we can imagine that this corroborates a statistic thrown out in the introduction to the footage. Indeed, the film opens with a machine-gun dialogue between two forensic doctors (one of whom played by Jonathan Cohen) recounting anything and everything. At that point, one of the two states that “ “Nowadays, you need 30% of disgusting things for a film to work with the public.” See Plastic guns take a trashy and macabre turn is therefore not surprising.
But in truth, avoiding this surge of violence would have been the right way to prove that good films can do without it. That great filmmakers can do better by suggesting it, by dissecting it. The choice of Meurisse sounds here almost like an admission of failure, as if he did not yet have the shoulders to do without. Given the mystery surrounding the whole affair at the heart of his project, this is a small failed act.
