"Gravity" is a show co-produced by the City of Nantes and Nantes Métropole, the Ministry of Culture – with the support of the State, Cultural Affairs Directorate (DRAC) of the Pays de la Loire region.
A film crew of ten people, including a producer, director, actors, special effects team and make-up artist, are caught up in the turmoil of their production. They are filming an episode for a television series. They find themselves in a state of weightlessness: there is the weightlessness we know linked to gravity and the weightlessness we experience in our daily emotions. The low-budget film crew will have to adapt to the scenario they discover.
And for good reason! The director is absent, the cameraman missed his train, and the producer, busy on another shoot, had to be replaced at the last minute. Only the script supervisor has a rough idea of the investigation to be conducted by a Soviet police commissioner from the future (2200) to solve the mystery of murders committed by fathers on their daughters and sons since 1962 in a general store.
This timeless collaboration bounces between 2025 (the actual time of filming in front of the audience) and that of cinema crime thrillers: a tribute to the macho atmospheres of Michel Audiard (Les Tontons flingueurs, etc.). But they are working for a good cause, as their mission is nothing less than to trace the murderous trail of women found with their faces smashed in with a (garden) shovel across generations. Based on a real-life news story: ‘She was bothering me, so I killed her with a shovel!’
At the same time, the life of a close-knit yet disjointed team, torn between the futility of their place in the world and the fascination of creation, reminds me of the juggling of everyday life in Robert Altman's ‘Short Cuts’ or François Truffaut's ‘Day for Night’: ‘There are no traffic jams in films, there are no timeouts. Films move forward like trains, you understand? Like trains in the night...’ And so the feminicides follow one after another.
Inspector Youri and his robot, Sergeant Mazarin, have arrived from the future to solve the case.
Sergeant: ‘... And boss, what if it was his wife who killed her?!’ - Inspector: "You wouldn't have fallen for that... What if you were right?" - Sergeant: ‘Reason is never wrong, unless it has reasons to be wrong, and if it were wrong with good reason, it's because there's no wrong in being right.’ - Inspector: ‘That's a twisted way of thinking!’
Just before discovering the arrival of Commissioner Yuri, Commissioner Froussard approaches the board displaying the flattened faces of the victims. He takes a breath and begins to list them: "Joséphine de Muche, found dead in a wheat field in Dublin in 1954. Brigitte Proutou taped to the roof of a bus in Warsaw in 1959. Sylvette Potin plastered to a building on Michelin Street in Istanbul in 1961. Germaine Bricot floating in the Suez Canal. Giselle Truc found under a duvet beneath her washing machine in Berlin... that's a lot of flattened women!" - Sergeant: ‘Chief! Look! A cosmonaut!’
So, it's time to get to work, kids! If we don't do the job, who the hell will? So let's roll up our sleeves and get going. Let's take off our braces, remove our shirts and, if necessary, shit in our knickers!
Sergeant: "Hey Chief, can I ask you a question?... To do this job, do you have to like people?" - Commissioner: "There's a bit of that, yes..." - Sergeant: "Then why do we arrest them all the time?" Commissioner: ‘Well, maybe we're paid to have morals... Right, come on kids: search the general store owner's wife !"
Sergeant: "But one person's morals aren't necessarily another's, and if we only target the petty criminals, how can the bigwigs at the top know that we're watching them?" - Commissioner: ‘Ah, that's a matter of salary. We're paid to catch the little guys. The bigwigs, they have dreams that keep us from touching them.’ - Sergeant: ‘I'd like to imagine that one day the tables will turn...’ - Commissioner: ‘But that's the law, lad!’ - Sergeant: ‘Yes... but the law can be blind, boss, just like justice when it skirts around the truth without looking at it.’
Car chase - Accident: Scene 15, take 8. Clapperboard! Camera rolling! Action!
Look! He's running away on the iron! There he is... He's disappeared... He's coming back! Inspector: ‘Come on! You're going to iron the asphalt from the cellar to the attic and trap him like a rabbit!’
Sergeant: ‘And what do we do with the grey areas?’ - Commissioner: ‘We slip them behind our ears. You close your eyes, sniff them... breathe in...’ - Sergeant: ‘I breathe in?’ Commissioner: ‘Yes, you breathe in! And when you breathe out, you breathe in the conclusion. And Inspector Youri will take care of the conclusion in the next series. End of episode! We're off to Brazil in '82 by cable car to lift the flattened fingerprints. There's no more money, the budgets have been cut.’ - Sergeant: ‘Yeah, just like women's heads, boss!’ - Commissioner: ‘Show some respect, please, Langlois!’ - Sergeant: ‘Well, at the same time, if we keep killing them, there won't be any left! How are we going to kiss them then?...’
© Jean-Luc Courcoult, Author-director, founder of Royal de Luxe
No comment yet