“She is part of the DNA of the series”, describes director Just Philippot: “A devoted friend”, on the Max platform from Friday, is worn by Laure Calamy, as a false victim of the Bataclan attack, case which hit the headlines. Revealed by the series “Dix pour cent” and César winner for “Antoinette dans les Cévennes”, the actress plays Christelle, whom everyone calls “Chris” in the four parts of less than an hour each of this mini-series, a most anticipated this fall.
This forty-year-old, stuck at her mother’s house, without a job, invents a friend seriously injured in the Bataclan attack of November 13, 2015. Making herself indispensable in an association of survivors, she will also unduly receive compensation reserved for victims.
This “Chris” is the fictional double of “Flo”, Florence M., sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 2018 for the facts transposed in the series. Alexandre Kauffmann, author of the investigative book “La mythomane du Bataclan”, the basis of the series, is credited in the credits. “Alexandre was a kind of compass when we were too far or too close to reality.
Above all, he created a blurring to protect the history and identity of those encountered by the main character”, explains Just Philippot for AFP. – Inexcusable and cracks – Laure Calamy interprets it, between inexcusable and cracks. “The mythomaniacs carry suffering, they feel the need to be looked at” and “monopolize the stories of others” she explains in the press kit for the series at the end of the series. preview screening of the first two episodes in mid-September at the La Rochelle Fiction Festival, the actress insisted on the alchemy with Just Philippot (“Acid”, in particular, on the big screen, with Guillaume Canet and Laetitia Dosch ).
“When we met, something became obvious,” agrees the director. “When she told me, ‘when I think of the series, I think of two films,’ I waited for the answer.” “I didn’t think they were the same as mine. She cited + Without roof or law + by Agnès Varda (with Sandrine Bonnaire) and + Joker + (with Joaquin Phoenix, a sequel of which has just been released) by Todd Phillips “.
Or “a large gap of references” in common “to try to be both arthouse cinema that I like and mainstream cinema that I find extremely intelligent”. For its first French original series, Max, in the fold of the American conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, dared a sensitive subject a little over a year before the tenth anniversary of the November 2015 attacks.
“I was very scared when I was offered the series,” confides Just Philippot. “One of the reasons why, initially, I refused it was to reactivate our memory.” “With certain scenes, I felt exactly what I had felt almost 10 years ago. Laure also says it (in the press kit, Editor’s note), in the sequence from the day after the attack, where she is at the foot of the Bataclan, she was petrified.” The director met Arthur Dénouveaux, president of the victims’ association Life for Paris, “to be as transparent as possible about how we saw things”.
“I think that he, without being worried or reassured, because he was at a long distance from our project to protect its members, I believe that humanly, he understood who I was.”
“He perhaps understood the approach that I was trying to take, which was to work with modesty and respect in a fiction which effectively mixed facts inspired by reality”, brushes Just Philippot. The attack on the Bataclan is thus just evoked by the sound of police and emergency sirens saturating the night in the capital.
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