Plastic Guns: a tasty black prank (review)
Jean-Christophe Meurisse tackles our least open faults by taking the Dupont De Ligonnès affair from the angle of comedy with an astonishing sense of dialogue and direction of actors.
Can we reasonably make people laugh with a quintuple murder? Convinced that there is humanity to be dissected (and therefore laughter to be created) behind the gloomy Xavier Dupont De Ligonnès affair, Jean-Christophe Meurisse boldly tackles the subject through a comedy. Customary of the mixture between morbid and absurd – the very successful Apnea And Blood Oranges –the director of the Chiens de Navarre theater troupe transforms XXDL into Paul Bernardin (imperial Laurent Stocker), who left to live his best life in Argentina after having ruined his entire family.
In Dijon, Léa and Christine (Delphine Baril and Charlotte Laemmel, a duo of godiches that will make you cry with laughter), Sunday investigators obsessed with Bernardin, learn that he would have been arrested in Northern Europe… Any resemblance to Guy Joao is not is obviously not accidental. Constantly provocative but rarely obscene, Meurisse seeks out the most twisted things in reality to anchor it to his own already crazy universe. Without too much flirtatiousness in the production, he relies above all on an astonishing sense of dialogue and direction of actors.
And under its air of black farce which pays the face of a society addicted to true crimes and news items, Plastic guns actually reveals a much deeper reflection on the definition of a monster (not always the one we suspect) and our inability to detect our own part of savagery. Inhumans, after all.
Of Jean-Christophe Meurisse With Laurent Stocker, Delphine Baril, Charlotte Laemmel… Duration 1 hour 36 minutes. Released June 26, 2024