Well-made, professional, successful films are nice. It’s rare, but when it happens, it produces a feeling of comfort, a well-being, a relief that erases all the disappointments, the annoyances, the failures, the hours spent watching comedies that don’t make you laugh.
I’m not against shaky-but-interesting films, with a flash of genius, an anthology scene, as they say, but after a while, there are false notes, lengths, incompleteness, melodramatic facilities, tolerating too much we end up in complacency or in a form of snobbery which is also detestable. A simply good film from start to finish, it’s still the best. So obviously, when I agree with everything, when I find nothing to complain about, neither with the actors, nor with the dialogues, when the scenario holds up, when the subject touches me to the point of feeling downright concerned by the story , I am gripped by a doubt, a nasty little light shines in the depths of my beatitude: am I not being trapped by a consensual work with a universal message and therefore a tad sensational? And then I rebel. I’m looking for the little beast.
I don’t have to look long to find what bothered me in Cédric Kahn’s film, Making of. Embarrassed in the sense of made uncomfortable, and made somewhat bitter: it’s that we had to wait all this time to finally see a good film about cinema. And worse: that it was him who did it, and not me. A little voice whispers to me: “It’s you, Christophe, who should have made this film, and a long time ago.” It’s not really jealousy I feel. At my age, this feeling has lost so much of its vigor that it is no longer even capable of spitting. And then, if I had been able to make this film, at the end of the 1980s, it would have had so many faults, biases, exaggerations, certainties that by wanting to make “a film about cinema”, I would have fallen for the pamphlet, spoiling the story, and it would have turned against me, once again.
Puppet Barnum
But that’s all there is to the story. That of Cédric Kahn flows from three sources. A committed film about the workers who take control of their factory (which he never tires of explaining to us what it produces, or maybe that escaped me). Second source, a making of filmed by a first-time filmmaker, Stefan Crepon, whom the director, Denis Podalydès, enlisted on a whim. Third source, a fiction written by Cédric Kahn, Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux that we follow from our spectator chair. The three sources intersect in the most natural way, according to a current geography, and the adventures generated by the stupidity, the malice, the goodness of one and the other. This narrative scoubidou allows each of the corporations to engage in a union standoff, the anars of art necessarily opposing the henchmen of big capital, and the ego of reality to the myth of production… And to the In the end, it is the demagogue of the distributor who wins.
In the meantime, the survival instinct of the film technicians rubs up against the ambitions of the actors caught between their role as workers with nothing left to lose and the reality of their status as intermittent workers with everything to gain… if by chance the film worked. Faced with the legitimate demands of everyone, Podalydès must also manage those of his legitimate self who is starting to get tired of playing Penelope for his depressed Ulysses.
Crossing the three dimensions of this barnum of puppets, Jonathan Cohen, as a narcissistic union leader, a pitiful bastard no longer knowing who to steal the spotlight from in order to exist, gets away with the worst exercise that can be imposed on an actor: being bad. It is awesome. With a thought for Orlando Vauthier who should have directed the making of but was unfairly fired, I left there carried by an infinite love for cinema.
Christophe Donner, writer
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