(Berlin) “It’s extraordinary! », Philippe Lesage told me in the credits. I had just pointed out to him that the audience in the House of World Cultures at the world premiere of his new film “Like Fire” on Sunday evening at the Berlinale laughed spontaneously and always at the right moment. Which is not a given when the audience has to read subtitles.
Posted at 8:12 p.m.
I could have confided in him: I didn't think I would laugh so much when I discovered a work by the Demons and Genesis filmmaker. I felt Lesage feverish, a few seats away from me in this large, crowded room near the Brandenburg Gate. He shifted in his seat. “My heart is beating at 200 miles an hour,” he told the audience after the screening. The loud applause he had just heard must have calmed him down.
In Comme le feu, which competes in the Berlinale “Generation 14+” section, old friends, the screenwriter Albert and the director Blake, can be seen, who after three years in the large chalet worthy of an outfitter, for the first time See you again in possession of the second. Her films were very successful until Blake – who has an Oscar in his library – decided to turn his attention to the nature and documentary industries. Albert created an animated television series called Rock Lobster, similar to the B-52's song. Because you have to pay your mortgage.
The two like to get at each other's throats, but there are consequences when a friendship is not in good condition. This is the opportunity for an impressive duel of actors – and characters – between Paul Ahmarani (Albert) and Arieh Worthalter (Blake), the French actor who recently starred in The Goldman Trial. The two actors improvised some of their dialogue with striking naturalness during scenes filmed one after the other in the dining room in which they told each other their truths.
Blake and Albert, “a bitter alcoholic” according to Blake, himself the archetypal narcissistic pervert, cause discomfort when breathing. Like the characters taken hostage at the table, we want to melt into our seats.
Ahmarani perfectly plays the neurotic screenwriter who is angry at the all-powerful director for ending their fruitful collaboration. Worthalter has adopted Quebec expressions with disarming naturalness, making his character of a French filmmaker with an outsized ego who has adopted “my cabin in Canada” completely believable.
“The script of the film was correct, but thanks to the actors the film is better than the script,” admitted Philippe Lesage after the screening of his film, surrounded by this impressive cast that also includes Sophie Desmarais, Guillaume Laurin, Laurent Lucas and others Irène Jacob, who also appears in the new film by Israeli Amos Gitaï, Shikun, was presented at the Berlinale on Saturday.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
Director Philippe Lesage
In “Like Fire,” Kieslowski's muse plays an actress who was in her prime in the 1990s and who, given the level of tension between Blake and Albert, explains that they are suffering from “cabin fever.”
This plot is coupled with a coming-of-age story with Jeff (Noah Parker, very convincing), shy, clumsy and secretive in Alyocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), Albert's daughter and Max's sister (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), in love. who invited Jeff to this weekend.
“I was interested in the disillusionment of young people who meet their mentors and realize that they have flaws and shortcomings. That was the premise of the film,” says Philippe Lesage. This is what happens to Jeff, an aspiring director and admirer of Blake. And that's what happened to Philippe Lesage's brother, the director Jean-François Lesage (Prière pour une mitaine perdu), as a teenager. “Never meet your heroes,” goes a Chinese proverb.
I wanted to take a look at adults that was missing from my previous films, but from the perspective of young people. It seems to me that adults are a species designed to disappoint. Adults often hide their egos and weaknesses.
Philippe Lesage, director
There might be a bit of Jean-Claude Lauzon in Blake. He is brilliant, impulsive and reckless, but it is not modesty that suffocates him. The character of Alyosha, an aspiring novelist, highlights the toxic masculinity that surrounds him. “I'm trying to use a different term because it seems overused to me, but like my previous film, the patriarchy and expectations of boys are at the heart of the film,” the filmmaker replied to an audience member who asked him the question.
As in his other features, Lesage creates an atmosphere of general concern despite the humorous traits of his characters. We're not surprised that he took inspiration from John Boorman's Deliverance and Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter, both for the photography direction and for the danger that lurks along the trails, forest and river. The pictures taken in Haute-Mauricie are also great.
In a more tragicomic style than Philippe Lesage's previous full-length features – with an important place given to music, particularly by Marjo and Zachary Richard – Comme le feu is perhaps his most accessible film. Although it drags excessively long at 2 hours 40 minutes and in the final act, the scenario seems to hesitate about which direction to take, like the characters in a canoe through the rapids.
It is a work that, above all, highlights the sharpness of this highly talented author and filmmaker's view of the human condition, which consists of petty hypocrisies, jealousies, disappointments, fleeting happiness and persistent anger.
The accommodation costs were covered by the Berlinale and Telefilm Canada.