Have you devoured the series with Pierre Niney and are missing embarrassing humor? The Première editorial team has a few nuggets to recommend to you.
The Office
Style mockumentarycamera gazes, characters in a pickle, slightly humorous cringe… Seen from afar (but really not that much), Fiasco could almost resemble a French rereading of The Office (the American version of course, less angry but more absurd and human) which would take place on a film set. If, by some crazy chance, you missed out on one of the greatest comedy series of all time, we strongly advise you to take a look at The Office US, office comedy led by the hair-raising Steve Carell. The story of the kindly crazy employees of a paper manufacturer, Dunder Mifflin, filmed in their daily lives for the purposes of a documentary. Nine seasons populated by unstoppable valves and crazy actors (Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, BJ Novak, Ed Helms…). Enough to occupy your evenings for a little while.
The Book of Solutions
Pierre Niney as a director unable to finish his film? We have already seen this, and as recently as last September: in The Book of Solutions, the actor played the whimsical and bipolar alter ego of Michel Gondry, who took refuge in the Cévennes to try to finish his feature film. Obviously (a little) less funny and more psychological than Fiasco, but Niney deploys his impeccable comic timing by putting himself in the shoes of a dreamer incapable of confronting the real world. Finally not so far from his character of Raphaël Valande… The perfect double bill?
Thunder in the tropics
If Fiasco recounts a chaotic shoot, what can we say about that of Thunder in the tropics ? The film tells the catastrophic and hilarious behind the scenes of an Oscar blockbuster where Ben Stiller (also behind the camera) plays a action hero on the return, Jack Black a drug addict flatulent comedy star, and Robert Downey Jr. a drug addict method acting who underwent skin pigmentation surgery to play an African-American soldier. Without forgetting Tom Cruise, unrecognizable and incredible as a tyrannical producer who sways to rap hits between two rants. A monument of irreverent humor which greedily sketches all the excesses of Hollywood. Quite simply the greatest US comedy of the century.
Fucking Kassovitz
Fiasco is not just an exercise in humor cringe. It is first of all the chronicle of a disaster, the story of a shoot which degenerates. In the genre, there has been a doc for around twenty years that first circulated pirately before literally becoming cult. It all starts with this sentence: “I’m not Orson Welles, I’m not Steven Spielberg, I’m Fucking Mathiou Kassovitz“. This is the start of one of the craziest documentaries about the Hollywood industry. Fucking Kassovitz recounts in its smallest details the industrial and artistic failure of Babylon AD, French-American blockbuster by Kassovitz. After filming a banal making of for this adaptation by Maurice Dantec, François Régis Jeanne returned with almost a mind-boggling hour which explains how, motivated to sign a wildly ambitious project, Kasso and Fox gave birth to a distressing B series crossed by rare visual flashes. Step by step, we discover everything that went wrong. There are the megalomaniac delusions of Kasso, Mélanie Thierry with her implacable lucidity (“When you find yourself at the helm of a blockbuster, you can’t act like you’re making a short film with friends”), Vin Diesel, producer and ultimate idiot, the joints, the cynicism of the producers, the aberrant artistic decisions… It’s all there, precise, relentless, as hilarious as it is frightening. Trust us: next door, shooting Raphaël Valande is a walk in the park.
Cast(s)
A few years before Five, the duo Pierre Niney – Igor Gotesman was already rampant with this pastille produced by Hugo Gélin and broadcast on Canal Plus between 2013 and 2015. And François Civil was also in the mix! Gotesman plays the casting director of this sketch series which has delivered countless cult episodes, such as “Rap Battle” where Marion Cotillard is clashed by Orelsan and Nekfeu. But the real attraction of Cast(s) it is indeed Pierre Niney. Aged 24 at the time, not yet revealed by Yves Saint Laurent, he displays his comic potential and his crazy energy, culminating in the sketch presented at the 2014 César Awards where he imitates Loran Deutsch. All the genius of Niney was already there before our eyes.
