Two villainous affairs have been hosting our dinners in town for three weeks. The Bettencourt Affairon Netflix and Of money and bloodon Canal +.
The first is a documentary endowed with a filmic trick imposed by a unique and exceptional material: the clandestine recordings made by Liliane Bettencourt’s butler during the billionaire’s meetings with her wealth manager Patrice de Maistre and with her friend the photographer François -Marie Banier.
I spoke to you last month about reality, the film by Tina Satter which recounts the misadventure of a whistleblower arrested by the FBI; the filmmaker took the text from the recordings to put it in the mouths of the actors. It was edifying. In The Bettencourt Affair, the directors no longer use only the text but the very sound of the pirate recordings, with the voices of the protagonists. The reconstructions are filmed from the ceiling above the heads of the actors who have the same hairstyle, the same baldness, the same clothes, the same build and gait as the real characters. It’s disturbing, exhilarating, the process is stylish and will undoubtedly become a standard, it makes the blurring, the masks, the makeup, the backlighting, the three-quarter back and the altered voices outdated. The spectator, as if boarded an intrusive drone, knows that these are actors, but he accepts the narrative pact for several reasons. First of all, the point of view offered to him is original, a bit ironic, and it goes very well with this story about which we already know almost everything, which frees us from the injunction often issued by documentaries: you will learn lots of things. Far from educational, it’s a pure delight to listen again to these pirate recordings that we know by heart and of which we never tire.
We also never tire of rehashing these unanswered questions: should we prevent a very rich old lady from throwing her money out of windows? Should we tolerate an unscrupulous man picking up this money and encouraging the old lady to continue this gesture which seems crazy, comical, unworthy, artistic, dada, desperate, perverse, sublime and what not?
Questions that divide even within families. This is the moment when your crook brother-in-law, jealous of Banier, gives you moral lessons, when the yellow vest cousin has tenderness for the billionaire without entertainment. It’s entertaining. Cinema has not yet appreciated the treasure that this mixture of genres represents. Pirandello’s cry “Fiction! Real! Go to hell, everyone!” becomes more prophetic than ever.
In the fight between Netflix and Canal +, Of money and blood does not give points to the encrypted channel which is already far behind its competitor. The more the directors, Xavier Giannoli and Frédéric Planchon, and their screenwriters try to keep things simple, the less we understand how this carbon tax scam could have worked. We agree that in fiction, it is the characters, the situations, the staging and the quality of the actors’ performance that count. Well the first episodes of the first series didn’t… they only made me want to know more about the protagonists of the case. I discovered that it had already given rise to a documentary mini-series, The Kings of Scamdirected by Guillaume Nicloux, barely two years ago, and produced by… Netflix.
The real Marco Mouly, kingpin of the affair, just out of jail, puts on a show, and we have to admit that next to him Ramzy Bedia who plays him in the Canal + fiction is no match. If you want to continue to understand nothing about the carbon tax issue, watch The Kings of Scam, it is the person’s revenge against his character. A delight.
Christophe Donner is a writer