Fotogenico: a hair-raising Marseille rock odyssey (review)

Through the desperate quest of a father in the footsteps of his dead daughter, this film electrifies everything in its path: the setting, the people, the music and Marseille.

In the cinema, the opportunities to feel the vibrations of a space – dreamed or not – are too rare to want to stay curled up in it when the opportunity presents itself. By chance of the calendar, we discovered Fotogenico during the last Cannes Film Festival where he discreetly paraded at ACID the same day as Love phew gleaming everywhere and where he succeeded, just as colorful, saturated with neon lights and music as Gilles Lellouche’s film, masterfully bringing out territories and characters. The film delivers a purely existential energy that is embodied in every pore of the frame until it viscerally embraces the viewer.

We enter here through the shaggy grace of Raoul (sublime Christophe Paou, formerly Unknown from the lake for Guiraudie), a shipwrecked father who arrives in Marseille in search of the traces left by Agnès, his daughter who died a year earlier. He immediately finds himself confronted with settings that do not conform to what he thought. “ Of all places, there’s nothing that matches! » he wonders, half naked after a night swim near the Old Port. From this trompe l’oeil opens a sensitive world that Raoul welcomes with the felicity of the squatter.

Here he is among modern young people, once linked by music but whose group spirit has been lost. Raoul intends to repair everything in the name of Agnès. Sublime sequences of a father searching for the precise place where his daughter perished in order to lie there in turn. Fotogenico is an electric film, ultra-sensitive but never tearful, capable of re-enchanting French cinema that is too well-groomed.

By Marcia Romano and Benoît Sabatier. With Christophe Paou, Roxane Mesquida, Angèle Metzger… Duration 1h38. Released December 11, 2024