Alpe d’Huez Festival: we saw Police Flash 80 with François Damiens

Jean-Baptiste Saurel sets the 80s ablaze with a detective comedy that mixes nostalgia, satire and pure directorial jubilation. A retro trip full of humor, energy and a real love for its outdated characters.

Three days and we’ve already got a top-notch comedy. The Alpe d’Huez Festival has just set the bar high.
The film is not in competition, since the president of the jury Audrey Lamy plays in it, but this comedy received unanimous approval in the afternoon. Imagined by Thomas Ngijol (who said on stage that he wanted to “pay homage to a wonderful era”) and directed by Jean-Baptiste Saurel, to whom we owe the short film La Bifle and along Zenithal, Flash 80 Font impresses from start to finish with its coherence, its style and its varied and nuanced comic springs.

Saurel in fact seems to have found his ideal playground: a retro, almost mythological France, where pastiche functions like a time machine but where the look remains very contemporary.

The director seizes the eighties like a highly flammable raw material: an era where Intercity reigned on the screens, where the Minitel fascinated technophiles, where rap barely came out of the cellars – but also a decade where drunk cops broke down doors and faces, often Arab, without really wondering if they were part of the decor or the problem. This tension, between time capsule and political lucidity, permeates the entire film. Saurel loves this France – like Ngijol who said in the intro he loved “this wonderful era” – but he never completely abandons himself to it. Thanks to his humor and generous writing, he achieves a strange balancing act: bringing those years back to life, giving them a vintage shine, without ever being fooled by them.

The story follows Yvon Kastendeuch, a colossus with a tender heart, a little stupid. This daddy cop, nationalist spirit and skin knitting to match, is thrown at the head of an experimental brigade after the death of his partner. François Damiens gives him a rare genius: he manages to make the stupidest cop in France totally endearing. His Kastendeuch looks like a character out of a comic strip by Gottlib, a Parisian Superdupont who confused virility and toughness. But behind the swelling and stupidity, Saurel finds a humanity – an almost involuntary tenderness.

This tenderness extends to the entire troupe, and this is undoubtedly what gives the film its strength. Thomas Ngijol, Xavier Lacaille, Audrey Lamy, Brahim Bouhlel: each inherits a character larger than life, but never reduced to a comic function. Lacaille, for example, triggers torrents of laughter in his crazy infiltration scenes: sometimes a junkie, sometimes a city youth, he navigates between caricature and virtuosity, each time finding a grain of truth in the excess. Lamy plays a girl from the 80s who fights as much against the thugs as against the machismo of her police station or of the time – a role where she brings a raw energy, a rare physicality. And Brahim Bouhlel who plays Marfoud, a Minitel-style geek, appears as the little prince of the discrepancy, delighting in every scene in which he appears.

Saurel films these figures as one films a team of shaky superheroes: they are not good anywhere, but they go there with such naive conviction that we end up believing in them. His sense of comedic timing, honed from his short and television work, works wonders. But it is enhanced by subtle writing and really strong production work (every detail is both credible and hilarious). Result: the humor hits just right, never heavy, often brilliant.

We often think of OSS 117for the taste of pastiche and the joy of replaying outdated codes. As with Hazanavicius, Saurel and Ngijol seem to venerate what they parody. They plunder the clichés but love them deeply. And as in the best OSS, the jubilation of form is accompanied by a critical reading: France of the 80s appears there in all its kitsch splendor, but also in what its rigidity, its stupid and self-confident virility, already announced our impasses today.

Because that’s what it’s all about: Flash 80 Font is not just a retro trip; it is also a way of asking a very current question: what does our society today owe to this “marvelous era”? This is the meaning of the very funny scene where city kids take notes in front of a city councilor who unknowingly prophesy the mechanisms of today’s traffic. Saurel does not give an answer, he prefers the gentleness of observation to the heaviness of the message. But beneath the laughter he lets a little melancholy emerge. That of its heroes overwhelmed by the world, who would like to live up to it but have neither the codes nor the words.

This layer of emotion, discreet but tenacious, makes the difference: the film avoids simple parody to become a tender tribute to a battered humanity.

Flash 80 Font is a generous, funny, extremely well-run show, but also a mirror – distorting but lucid – held up to our own time. A mixture of schoolwork and sincerity that smacks.