tournee by mathieu amalric

The film of Mathieu Amalric,

the actor, the writer and the director,

breaths off the melancholy of a cinema

telling of theatre and shows.

TOURNEE suggests an Altmanian tone and warmth. 

It is a marvelous film that induces dispersion and chaos. Reality here is only described through contrasts.

The one reality to be lived in all its plain incongruity.

A wild, poetical, diverting, exhilarating, desperate, insolent and miraculous filmic gesture!

  Joachim the Producer lived far from France ever since he decided to abandon all and change life.

He is now back with a New Burlesque theatre company, which gathers 5 charismatic strippers.

They inflame their public with ironical inventions and sympathetic sensuality.

They tour around coastal French towns.

Their life on the road is full of colorless “no-places” which make their life peculiar and a lot less glamorous than one could think.

  The voice is almost of a documentary,

especially for all the theatre moments,

and it allows the director to  note the joy of those performances, and that of another France,

one that is not the one of the postcards...

Between two cities, between two shows, pop out the anxieties of this loser that’s not even admitting to himself as to be one! A man for whom it is impossible to rehabilitate with his past, including with his sons, who is just happy with his new family that allows him to live without remorse and which asks for so little in exchange, just for another place where to evolve. As Amalric knows it very well: that is the life of a performer.

The invisible landscape of this tour, devoured by the darkness of alcoolised nights, excluded from any gaze, tell us about the unpredictable dynamics of these characters.

Their living space is always an equal amount of trains, cars and hotels that repeat themselves ab infinitum. For these modern and yet anachronic women it is impossible to resist the temptation of breaking the schemata and filling up their inner voids with new voices and theatrical gestures.

It’s a film about the intimate and visionary story of several men and women, fathers, wives or mothers, show people, aging men and women, who try to run their life using out of context stories. Stories that do not match their children anymore, of whom they do not remember birthdays or addresses, to which they do not know to tell stories anymore for making them sleep at night. They are out of match with their friends, who end up by abandoning them. They are out of match with money, too, missing when they need to achieve their dreams.

In this exaggerated rhythm of life the background music or the TV screens becomes the sign of an indistinct reality where none of these characters could recognize themselves. So they prefer to turn them off and try to change, for a night, for yet another night, the colors of their surrounding world. They are therefore filling up with nothing the void that paillettes and feathers cannot cover. In a pitiable attempt to make the show go on, to arrive at their next theater and evolve in their next show, until the lights will eventually be turned off….

Giulia Dobre