The film of Mathieu Amalric, the actor, the writer and the director, breaths off the melancholia of a cinema telling of theatre and shows.
TOURNEE suggests an Altmanian tone and warmth, in a marvelous film that induces dispersion and chaos.
Reality here is only described through contrasts.
It is 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 that inflame their public with ironical inventions and sympathetic sensuality.
They tour around coastal French towns, while Joachim races to find a Parisian theatre and his own lost life.
Their trip 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, and it allows the director to note at the same time the joy of those performances, and that other France, one that is not on the postcards.
Between two cities, between two shows, pop out the anxieties of this man. A man for whom it is impossible to rehabilitate with his past, including with his sons.
A man 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 gloomy nights filled with alochool and with casual and saddening sex, 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.
TOURNEE circles amazingly subjects as the solitude of middle aged people, the solitude of performers, or what happens when falling out of love, out of interest, out of success, or out of life. Of what happens when the lights are turned off and you are alone in your room, facing yourself, facing the void...
It tells of the mechanism of desire, of its origins and its evolution. Of its (im)possible fullfilement...
It borders feelings and meere phisicality, first or second degree, the full understanding of "what you see is what you (don't) get"!....
It paints the limits between youth and adult age, between a fit body and a body with history, between home and elsewhere, between existing in the present or holding back to the past....
TOURNEE is a film about the intimate and visionary story of several men women, fathers, wives or mothers, show people, aging men and women, who try to run their life using the context.
A context 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, 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 become 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.
In a heartbreaking 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
remastered on July 14th 2012
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