“A James Bond mixed with Monsieur Hulot”: trailer for Animal Totem

Benoît Delépine’s new film with Samir Guesmi promises to be particularly original, free and intriguing.

It’s a unique road movie that the trailer forAnimal Totem : Samir Guesmi plays Darius, a man with a wheeled suitcase to which he is handcuffed, and who crosses the countryside and suburbs to carry out a mysterious mission. Benoît Delépine’s film seems to play as much on visual poetry as on political anger, and takes the form of a mixture of tale and pamphlet.

Delépine’s note of intent sheds light Animal Totem : “Originally, Gustave and I, unable to make our film Dada for sad financial reasons, decided to each make a solo album: him in Mauritius, me in Picardy. Is it the memory of my farmer father, who sometimes came home yellow from head to toe from chemicals? The happiness of the harvest months? The cereal plains as far as the eye can see, the slightly wild humans, the animals that survive them? Freeze these important moments of my life. Another clue: far too many of my loved ones have died of cancer “in good health” – “she didn’t smoke”, “it’s bad luck’s fault”. And then, these days, we discover PFAS, eternal pollutants, everywhere. And above all, we discover that we only discovered them today because we didn’t want to look for them yesterday. Deciding to write after an environmentalist battle won in my adopted region: a bituminous coating factory which threatened to be established a stone’s throw from a Natura 2000 zone, on the banks of the Charente. Desires to scream. To symbolically avenge myself through cinema.”

Delépine also evokes animism, the grace of animals, the desire to film with a “predator retina“and the desire to return to light, free and almost childish filming. He also explains the discovery of Samir Guesmi and his airs of “James Bond mixed with Monsieur Hulot“, which we actually find in this trailer.

Animal Totem will be released in theaters in France on December 10, 2025,