In this powerful fiction, Samuel Le Bihan plays the French navigator Yves Parlier during his exceptional journey on the Vendée Globe in the year 2000.
« Pierre Isoard and I spend half the year in the mountains for the series Alex Hugo. We wanted a story of another kind and another extreme. Far from the thriller. Close to the sea… »explained Samuel Le Bihan, met last April in Lille, at the Séries Mania festival. The director and the actor have known each other, it is true, for a long time. This connivance was necessary, no doubt, to carry out such a project: the free adaptation of Robinson of the seasan autobiographical story in which French sailor Yves Parlier recounts the extraordinary story he experienced during the 2000-2001 Vendée Globe. The skipper and trained engineer, victim of a paragliding accident a few years earlier, dismasted halfway through this frenetic world tour without stopovers or assistance.
Alone portrays the man, his passion for the sea, his taste for adventure, his mentality, his pugnacity, his resilience, his creativity, and how the sailor managed, in the face of adversity, to transform his race against others boats in combat with itself. A human challenge. And for this TV film, a challenge of production, direction and interpretation. It was indeed necessary to find the boat, neither too old nor too expensive. Then the filming locations and basins, between Lorient and Les Sables-d'Olonne (the landscapes of New Zealand were produced in computer-generated images). The film crew also had to be small, so as not to interfere with each other on the boat. Finally, it was necessary to have a strong actor with enough sea legs to withstand the swell for days on end. « The hardest part was losing weight. Out of respect for Yves, of whom I am a fervent admirer, I had to be credible. I starved myself », says the actor.
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The result is a very successful fiction, served by an extremely sober staging – the elements, the man and the boat. By a soundtrack composed almost entirely of surges, gusts and crackles. By a powerful light. And through the performance of Le Bihan, all gestures, pains, looks, so close to nature and usually silent, like Alex Hugo, the mountain cop he has played for ten years for France 2.
Tribute to sailors
Nearly twenty-five years after this crossing, Alone is also a very beautiful tribute, to adventure, to boats, to sailors and to those who carry them, like here his companion (Anne Suarez), so careful to respect the desire of her man, to support him and encourage, whatever it costs him and without ever showing anything of his fears. In his note of intent, Pierre Isoard adds that the TV film also raises the question of our relationship to existence, to unleashed nature, to our instinct and what « we are all led to live, personally and collectively, in the years to come ». Great food for thought… Welcomed with enthusiasm at the Hauts-de-France fiction festival, awarded an award at the brand new CreaTVty festival, the fiction will be followed by the documentary Vendée Globe 1996-1997 : a race through hell. This evening, eminently human and sporting, is part of an exceptional editorial system put in place around the departure, on November 10, of the 10e edition of the Vendée Globe. Forty Imoca 60s will then leave Les Sables-d'Olonne for several weeks (between 74 and 150 days), the time of an odyssey of nearly 45,000 km, i.e. around the Earth, from west to east, across all the oceans of the world.
