The 2 Alfreds on Arte: Bruno Podalydès at his best (review)
A wonderful comedy full of discoveries which takes a lucid and amused look at the excesses of an ultra-connected world.
Released in cinemas in June 2021, Les 2 Alfreds, by Bruno Podalydès, is rebroadcast this Wednesday evening on Arte (and available for streaming on Arte.TV). Carried by Sandrine Kiberlain, Denis Podalydès and the director, this film on ultra-connection was very popular with Première. Here is our review.
Bruno Podalydès – Les 2 Alfred: “All my films are political, even Bécassine!”
We know that living ultra-connected to each other via apps and other virtual networks does not necessarily strengthen our social bonds. In the same way that the “cool” varnish which covers certain work spaces (with the table football in the middle of the open space!), makes the task less painful, in reality exercising a new form of control over the employee. The handyman Bruno Podalydès here plunges both feet into this falsely temperate 2.0 world (in fact extremely anxious and distressing).
The title alone, however, brings a little comfort and sets the tone. Because these 2 Alfreds do not designate characters with the same first name but a child’s cuddly toy made up of two inseparable monkey-shaped soft toys, mute witnesses to this human comedy. The filmmaker immediately places himself on the side of affect. The film is only about that and could even be seen as a love letter to its main performer, Sandrine Kiberlain, the on-screen incarnation of the aggressive working girl whose mask will gradually fade to reveal a devastating charm. A miracle due in part to his meeting with the two “Poda” (Bruno and Denis), here Arcimboldo and Alexandre, two “real” sensitive humans. A rescue that will have the taste of reciprocity, since this solar “troop” will manage to get back afloat by balancing their strength. A revolution which will pass, we suspect, not a questioning of technological and psychological enslavement.
However, it would be stupid to make Bruno Podalydès the champion of an inevitably stale “it was better before”. It is rather our ability to adapt to reality that he probes here. A reality of which he points out the failures, the limits, the extravagances but also the poetry. So drones in the shape of vintage flying saucers hang around here almost everywhere, like the residue of dented progress and therefore furiously alive.
The 2 Alfreds tells the story of Alexandre (Denis Podalydès), an unemployed fifty-year-old miraculously hired in a start-up populated by over-motivated thirty-somethings with white teeth. The company’s philosophy establishes self-sacrifice as a credo and denies its employees the right to have children. Alexandre therefore hides his paternity and soon finds himself under the control of Séverine (Sandrine Kiberlain), a living embodiment of the values of the said company. She travels in a car without a driver who responds to her actions via her mobile phone. At the center of the duo, there is Arcimboldo (Bruno Podalydès), an independent entrepreneur and sweet dreamer who is trying to find the right formula by creating more or less lame connected services (the drones are him!)
We may remember that in Comme un avion by the same Bruno Podalydès, the filmmaker played a man leaving a gloomy daily life in a canoe (Kiberlain was already in the mix!) in search of a pastoral Eden. No escape this time, the heroes of the 2 Alfreds remain at the dock. The city for Podalydès – a lover of the clear Tintin-style line – has nothing threatening at first glance, at most its depopulation is a little worrying. Fifty-three years ago with the brilliant Playtime, Jacques Tati was already asking himself the question of the reorganization of our lives in the face of a blissful modernism. It was not so much the technology that he questioned (the appearance of televisions in identical homes in particular…) as the way in which space was reconfigured and forced humans to adapt quickly. An adjustment that authorized derision. Like Tati, Podalydès also relies on the chaotic and destructive force of burlesque to re-enchant the world. Thanks to them.
