J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster

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Movie
German title J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster
Original title J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 2007
length 113 minutes
Rod
Director Samuel Benchetrit
script Samuel Benchetrit
production Olivier Delbosc ,
Marc Missonnier
music Dimitri Tikovoi
camera Pierre Aïm
cut Sophie Reine
occupation

1. Story and epilogue

2nd story

3rd story

4th story

J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster (German: “I've always dreamed of being a gangster”) is a French feature film by Samuel Benchetrit from 2007 . The laconic-melancholy crime comedy in black and white consists of four episodic narrative threads that are slightly intertwined.

action

The four episodes develop in or around a poorly attended cafeteria on the edge of a highway. The protagonists are penniless and mostly also clueless. A basically harmless would-be gangster tries to rob a waitress who is actually an armed robber. Two unemployed people try to extort money from a rich man by kidnapping his daughter amateurishly - but she turns out to be suicidal. Two singers who were once successful and who are now walking through the provinces meet by chance. Over coffee they talk about God and the world and try to hide their loss of meaning from each other. Five active ex-crooks of retirement age indulge in memories of their old hiding place where they once played cards together. But instead of the hiding place in the middle of the forest, you will now find the cafeteria. They are flirting with a new coup and discover that the place where the bank they wanted to rob is now a fast food restaurant.

background

Director Samuel Benchetrit at the preview of J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster at the UGC Ciné Cité Bercy in Paris

Director Samuel Benchetrit showed his son, to whose mother Marie Trintignant he was previously married, Italian comedies from the sixties. Because the son burst out laughing, Benchetrit decided to make a film based on the almost disappeared genre. He was aware that with his modest budget he would not get the actors for three months, at best for ten days. So he came up with the sketch form. The Sergi López prevented because of a broken leg was replaced by Édouard Baer . In total, the production cost one and a half million euros.

Reviews

Numerous critics easily recognized the cinematic references and models: the comedies by Chaplin and Monicelli , the atmosphere in the films by Kaurismäki and Jarmusch, and subjects from Pulp Fiction (1994).

For the French film magazine Positif , the reunification of retirees into a gang recalls a comedy by Risi or Monicelli. But director Benchetrit does not come close to his role models. The scenes with the waitress and the robber are overplayed and boring, only the Kaurismäki kidnappers are amused because Benchetrit suspends his smug act and lets the two play.

The film was not released in Germany, but in Switzerland in 2008. Florian Keller wrote in the Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger that with this “wonderfully melancholy crook ballad” Benchetrit had landed a “nice coup”. He described the protagonists as "social losers with the criminal energy of an energy-saving lamp" who would find a "tragicomic dignity". "Although you feel reminded of great role models in every scene, Samuel Benchetrit still finds his own tone, which absolves his homage from mere epigonism."

Meanwhile, Thomas Binotto of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung said: “A laconic homage to the cinema of the fifties, to Vittorio De Sica and Charles Chaplin. […] However, the finger exercises forget that De Sica and Chaplin were also perfectionists who worked hard for their light-handed tragic-comic. ”On their own,“ undivided pleasure ”, the four episodes together would not result in a film of two Hours because they are too similar tonally to be too monotonous.

The film-dienst reviewer Stefan Volk interpreted the deliberate axis skips and unusual cuts as a method to "convey the feeling of a rebellious, 'dirty' cinema." The bonds with Tarantino are limited by the lack of shootings, psychopaths and torture. "The gangster life, the film seems to want to say, is always heroic where it doesn't take place." This is explicitly not a " pulp fiction infusion" because it goes beyond its trivial culture references and contrasts the gangster dreams with reality.

Awards

Sundance Film Festival 2008:

  • Award for Best Screenplay (Samuel Benchetrit)
  • nominated as best film

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Samuel Benchetrit in Le Parisien, March 26, 2008, p. 33: "Un genre de film en voie de disparition"
  2. ↑ Jean-Luc Douin: Samuel Benchetrit aime les truands d'antan . In: Le Monde, March 26, 2008, p. 31; Sophie Conrard: Quatre petits casses et puis s'en vont . In: La Croix , March 26, 2008; Emmanuel Hecht: Voyous et bras cassés . In: Les Echos , March 27, 2008
  3. ↑ a b Fabien Baumann: J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster . In: Positif , April 2008, p. 42
  4. ↑ a b Stefan Volk: Kinoschweiz. J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster . In: film-dienst , No. 14/2008, 3, July 2008, pp. 28–29
  5. ↑ a b Florian Keller: Gangster with the criminal energy of an energy-saving lamp . In: Tages-Anzeiger , July 2, 2008, p. 41
  6. ↑ a b Thomas Binotto: From the toil of gangsterism . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , July 3, 2008, p. 41