The fine company

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Movie
German title The fine company
Original title Ma Loute
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 2016
length 122 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 14
Rod
Director Bruno Dumont
script Bruno Dumont
production Rachid Bouchareb
Jean Bréhat
music Philippe Lecoeur
camera Guillaume Deffontaines
cut Basile Belkhiri
occupation

The fine company (original title: Ma Loute ) is a French comedy film from 2016. Directed by Bruno Dumont , who also wrote the screenplay.

action

The fine company is set on the French Côte d'Opale in the summer of 1910 , depicting the everyday life of two opposing families and interweaving them with investigations into a criminal case.

The van Peteghem family, scattered over various cities in France, came from the French money nobility. André van Peteghem and his wife Isabelle own a luxurious holiday home, picturesquely situated on a rock above the mouth of the Slack , in which they spend their summer vacation together with their daughters Gaby and Blanche. As every year, their relatives Aude and Christian visit them; Audes daughter Billie is also present. The male van Peteghems suffer from disabilities and strange tics , the adult women tend to hysteria , all the result of inbreeding practiced over generations , which makes the relationships somewhat confusing. The Rohbrecht family, consisting of the father “Der Ewige”, the nameless mother, the 18-year-old son Lümmel and the three smaller boys Cloclo, Patte and Ti-Louis, live under precarious circumstances in the fishing village of Saint Michel. The Rohbrechts live from the sale of mussels they have collected themselves, and “Der Ewige” and Lümmel also earn money by transporting tourists across the Slack that flows into the sea . For 20 centimes, they carry people across the shallow river at low tide or they cross over by rowing boat. Occasionally they make tourists disappear to eat at home. The missing tourists call on Inspector Blading and his assistant Böswald, who slowly investigate the matter with little success at first.

Starting from a hike during which the van Peteghems let themselves be transported from the Rohbrechts to the other bank of the Slack, Lümmel and Billie come together; eventually the two fall in love. As a result, there is inevitably contact between the families, but because of their contrasting ways of life, they cannot find each other. Lümmel and Billie overcome the contrasts first and hold on to their love. However, when Lümmel discovers that the androgynous Billie is a boy, he knocks him down and delivers him at home as a source of food. A little later the Rohbrechts catch Christian van Peteghem in the dunes by the sea and store him with Billie. When father “The Eternal” also catches Aude van Peteghem and throws him to the others, Inspector Blading starts a large-scale search. The lout, unsure of his feelings, gets scruples, frees the van Peteghems and dumps them in the dunes, where they are found by Blading. The film ends openly: Lümmel finds happiness in a relationship with the maid Nadège, Billie remains alone, and the fate of the rest of the Rohbrechts remains uncertain.

History of origin

Binoche, Luchini, Lavieville, Bruni Tedeschi and Vincent at the Cannes Festival (2016)

Director Dumont sees himself in the tradition of Flemish painters , who, according to him, have worked a lot with shadows, contrasts, opposites and exaggerations. His self-image is that of a "fairly radical" filmmaker with an "extreme view of (...) characters and (...) realities". Fine Society is his ninth film, and most of them are set in northern France, which is where he grew up. Originally, he wanted to shoot the film in black and white to capture the graininess of images from the 1910s. The shooting of the film only lasted 45 days. The premiere of The Fine Society in France on May 12, 2016 as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2016 . The film was released in German-speaking countries on January 26, 2017. The names of the people involved have been changed for the German version. The original names of the Rohbrechts are Brutfort (an acronym from “brutal” and “force”), the police officers Blading and Böswald Machin and Malfoy, and the protagonist Lümmel Ma Loute, which is also the original French title of the film.

Dumont worked almost entirely with amateur actors before The Fine Society ; only for his 2013 film Camille Claudel 1915 did he work with Juliette Binoche , who again plays a prominent role in The Fine Society . The actress who played Billie is officially referred to only as " Raph ". The background is that the schoolgirl who embodies Billie does not want to bring her private life into public. Little more is known about her than that she goes to school in Blaringhem and describes herself as androgynous.

criticism

The fine company on Metacritic achieved a score of 60 out of 9 aggregated ratings. Michael Meyns described the fine company for Filmstarts.de as an “extreme art film version of the popularWillkommen bei den Sch'tis ”, since the basic theme - the clash of different cultures in one place - would be exaggerated into the grotesque, while at the same time humanism was the basic motif of the development of the characters. With the region portrayed in the film and its inhabitants, Dumont created his own grotesque world in which the Rohbrechts indulging in cannibalism are still the most normal people. Johannes Bluth analyzed for Der Spiegel that Dumont shows in his study of society “a system of limitless egoism and social exclusion”. Bluth criticized that the director exaggerated in his tendency towards the grotesque, indulging in an "eccentric formalism" and a "prefabricated grid of the calculated slapstick" and thus made a more in-depth representation of the examined milieus impossible and in view of the long playing time of the audience Films generate "growing indifference". The industry journal Variety as a " misanthropic director" who is still looking for a clear line with his ninth film. Editor Peter Tebruge found that Dumont had "thrown a multitude of genres (...) into a goulash kettle and cooked them up with dingy local color (...), an awkward crime story (...), an exaggerated social farce (...) and an ironic cannibal intrigue" for Die fein Gesellschaft . He drew parallels with Delicatessen and Everyone is the first to die .

Fine company was selected for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, but lost to me, Daniel Blake . Other festivals at which the film was shown were the Moscow International Film Festival , the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival , the French Film Days Tübingen-Stuttgart , the Jerusalem Film Festival , the Festival de Cine de Montevideo and the Cinema One Originals Film Festival in Manila . At the 42nd César Awards 2017 , he was nominated in the "Best Film" category and in eight other categories, but won none.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Release certificate for the fine company . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. Age rating for The Fine Society . Youth Media Commission .
  3. Kurier.at: Bruno Dumont interview: “I'm pretty radical”. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  4. ^ Festival-Cannes.com: Slack Bay: the burlesque whimsy of Bruno Dumont. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  5. LaVoixduNord.fr: Béthune: la vie "normal" de Raph, après "Ma Loute" et le Festival de Cannes. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  6. ^ Metacritic.com: Slack Bay. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  7. ^ Filmstarts.de: The fine company. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  8. Spiegel.de: The growling in the head. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  9. Variety.com: Cannes Film Review: 'Slack Bay'. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .