From the Comédie-Française: THE comedy of summer 2026 (review)

The troupe is on the verge of a nervous breakdown: there are three hours left to save a premiere at the Comédie-Française. A first feature as lively as it is tender, a jubilant manifesto on the collective and the actors.

Only three hours left until the three shots. Nina, a young resident of the Comédie Française, has just been promoted to director of a Macbeth and arrives by bike at the doors of the Frenchman. Tonight is his first. And the obstacles will accumulate: forgotten badge, zealous guard, main actress stuck in a TER in Brest, minister who invites himself, egos which flare up… Everything goes into a tailspin. But at Molière’s house, we don’t cancel. This is the rule, this is the spring.

Creators of Broute, Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau sign a first feature set to the tempo of disaster. Filmed behind the scenes of the Richelieu Hall, their closed session in real time slides from the dressing rooms to the corridors and transforms the institution into a lion’s cage: costumes that come unstuck, philosophical stagehands and ingenuous makeup artists, explosive susceptibilities… Straddling the line between fiction and documentary, we ultimately find few equivalents to this mechanism, which is as playful as it is stimulating. There is a bit of Lux Æterna for the cascading disruption, and we sometimes think of Frances Ha for the battered grace of the heroine.

Because she is the star of the film: Pauline Clément – fragile and stubborn, luminous to the breaking point – asserts herself here as one of the greats of French cinema. Around her, the actors of the troupe (from Laurent Stocker to Marina Hands via Benjamin Lavernhe or Sephora Pondi) play the burlesque doubles of their own legends with infectious joy. But beneath the farce emerges a lucid declaration of love for the troupe, this alchemy where rivalry gives birth to the sublime. It is a manifesto which defends the troupe against the times, the common against individual performance, and the stage as a shared art. Let’s call it a leap of faith.

By Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau. With Pauline Clément, Laurent Stocker, Marina Hands… Duration: 1h15. Released July 22, 2026