A dramatic comedy, “Those Who Blush” recounts the meeting between high school students and a theater teacher whose methods will upset the teenagers. Grand prize in the short formats category of the last Séries Mania festival in Lille, the series is available on Play RTS.
Atmosphere. Inside a gymnasium, on the floor, a troupe of teenagers in theater major are getting impatient. Their teacher is conspicuous by his absence. However, there is no shortage of work, with a Shakespeare play to rehearse. Suddenly, a young man with a determined approach arrives and introduces himself as the temporary replacement. He questions and takes the pulse of the assembly.
His boorish methods disconcert the apprentice actors. Worse, when he decides to redistribute the roles, the loudest one doesn’t let himself be fooled. She has worked hard, knows her text by heart and cries out for injustice. The teacher’s reaction: “But do you even know the whole story? So you would be the actress of a single role in your life, incapable of playing anything else?”
>> Watch the trailer for the series:
Close to the documentary
Signed by Julien Gaspar-Oliveri and co-produced by RTS, the series “Ceux qui rougeux” offers a documentary-like recording with two cameras running constantly without the words “action” and “cut” ever being uttered. Thus immersed, the spectators feel exactly the emotions of the students. Constantly on the alert, they must manage the pressure, overcome their shyness, free themselves in the face of this harsh but caring teacher, who acts like a tsunami and takes advantage of each gesture and verbal or physical reaction to create theater.
Any excuse is good to play. He does not hesitate to immerse them in certain psychological states, without ever violating them, to teach them to feel in order to interpret better. On the theme of rejection and goodbye at the dawn of a romantic breakup, bodies express themselves in pain. The rejected attempt a hugin vain, return to the charge, always in vain. The exercise becomes more and more trying, the tears are close to flowing, and the light suddenly comes in when the director orders the last hug.
Tapping into the unconscious
Each situation proposed is a special moment where teenagers open up, tell stories, talk to each other, talk about who they are, what they experience, what they feel. They also laugh when it comes to acting crazy or when the teacher decides that men will be women and vice versa. Through these repetitions a subtle portrait of adolescence emerges, at the same time as the series shows the work of the actor drawing emotions buried in the unconscious to give substance to a character.
The filmmaker-actor Julien Gaspar-Oliveri, by refusing to give in to the facilities of the standard soap opera with its procession of artifices based on love affairs or enmities within the group, relies solely on the sensitivity of the characters to magnetize the spectators. And it is precisely because they are remarkably sensitive that the irrepressible desire to discover the following episodes is felt.
In March 2024, the jury of the short format series competition of the Séries Mania festival in Lille, France, led by filmmaker Fabrice Gobert, crowned “Those Who Blush”. It was with a touch of emotion and enthusiasm rare in such an awards ceremony that he praised, during the awards, the qualities of a moving, captivating and funny series, a success all round.
Interviewed in Lille by RTS, Julien Gaspar-Oliveri emphasized how lucky he had been in this adventure to have been able to count on Box Production, Arte and RTS. These institutions, attentive to this project whose script was written in the conditional with adolescents, some of whom had no experience of theater and cinema, knew how to take the profitable risk of contributing to the emergence of an extraordinary series.
Philip Spouses/mh/aq
“Those who blush” by Julien Gaspar-Oliveri. Season 1 (8 episodes) to watch on Play RTS since November 6, 2024.
Update of an article first published in March 2024.
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