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In the vaudeville landscape of French cinema, full to the brim with romantic and community quarrels, Céline Devaux takes a tangent by offering a comedy of depression. She revives with sparkling faith the cinematographic art of the duo, here that of a defeated careerist and a carefree oddball with a grenadine heart and pin-up glasses.
Boss of a start-up, Jeanne (Blanche Gardin), an engineer in her forties, is about to launch her Nausicaa project, supposed to clean the oceans and save the world. She is convinced: like Marie Curie, she is the woman of the century.
On the day of the launch, nothing goes as planned… Her submersible column, devouring waste, disintegrates a few seconds after being put into the water. In a Pavlovian reflex, Jeanne dives and swims a few strokes towards the disaster. The video goes viral on social media. It’s not easy to keep the boat of a fairy tale afloat.
Inexhaustible source of humor
Coming from the cartoon world, the director injects, into her first live-action feature film, short pencil sequences which describe in detail the neurotic tension of Jeanne, determined to avoid any notable progress in getting out of her state.
Hairy ghosts break into her thoughts to make fun of the big existential questions in the women’s magazines that haunt her: how to boost her self-esteem, be a good person and stop self-sabotage… The gap between these cruel and crude little beings who wiggle while showing their buttocks and Jeanne’s apparent stoicism proves to be an inexhaustible source of humor. The director’s slightly sadistic choice to lend her cheeky voice to these turbulent Jiminy Crickets increases the heroine’s nightmare and our pleasure with it.
Then comes the chance meeting with Jean (Laurent Lafitte), a former classmate. From the outset, Jeanne hates her nonchalance, her lightness, her spontaneity, which only reinforce, in comparison, her morose defeat.
While she is all alone a fixed plane curled up on itself, without depth or view – Jeanne at the kitchen table; Jeanne on the living room sofa; Jeanne slumped – Jean is mobile, opens doors, visits her friend’s apartment, walks around, creates a tracking shot, creates a diversion. He says what he thinks, lies good-naturedly, doesn’t want to work, enjoys the best moments. He is also the only man on earth who has not heard, or very little, of Jeanne’s enormous failure, offering him the possibility of becoming anyone on the more relaxing path of anonymity.
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This playful option, which exempts itself from the strict rules of the typical secondary character, gives all its charm and relaxation to the film in a freedom of tone and style that provides euphoria. Instead of the psychologist, to whom many of our heroines unload their waste and catastrophes, Céline Devaux chooses Jean and favors the power of diversion in a staging as a whole full of finesse and relevance.
Everyone loves Jeannefilm by Céline Devaux (Fr., 2022, 95 min). With Blanche Gardin, Laurent Lafitte, Maxence Tual.
