2023-08-09 10:00:00
What is the link between the owner of an art gallery who has to run his business at all costs and his protege, a painter in the midst of a crisis of inspiration who refuses to sell his art to dealers? None, apparently. Between the conciliatory Arthur (Vincent Macaigne) and the radical Renzo (Bouli Lanners), everything is an excuse to bicker and patch things up. Everything separates them except a feeling stronger than themselves: friendship with a capital A, disinterested, spontaneous, obvious.
Follower of the formula of the comic duo, the white clown and the Auguste, synonymous with success – De Funès/Coluche, Ventura/Brel, Depardieu/Richard, Lhermitte/Villeret -, Rémi Bezançon makes his honey of it in A masterstroke, his new film freely adapted from an Argentinian black comedy, My Masterpiece (2018). It’s about art, of course, but also about a daring plan put together by Arthur to save his friend from shipwreck. Problem: both will quickly be overwhelmed by the situation.
Since his film debut, friendship has been Rémi Bezançon’s favorite theme. We had already noticed it in his cartoon A joke (2012) on the complicity between a young African slave and a giraffe, then in My life in the air (2005, with Marion Cotillard, Vincent Elbaz, Gilles Lellouche) and in The Henry Pick Mystery (2019) which evoked the budding friendship of a man (Fabrice Luchini) and a woman (Camille Cottin).
“Everything is often ephemeral”
” In A master stroke, underlines the filmmaker, I wanted to go further, to push this theme to the extreme to make it a sort of romantic comedy where two characters who are completely opposed are irremediably friends in life and in death. »
So here is Arthur trying to find an order for his friend Renzo and get him out of trouble. A fresco painted for a large company does the trick, but the artist sabotages it at the last moment. Arthur, who has a gallery to run, does his best to help Renzo, but he comes up against a wall of incomprehension.
READ ALSO“Our futures”: a big party with friendsHe is a merchant who questions art and money, is interested in new ways of selling such as NFTs (Non Fungible Token), a process that assigns digital ownership to works of art. “Today, NFTs are falling apart, like cryptocurrencies, notes Rémi Bezançon. It’s like our time where everything is often ephemeral and goes very quickly. »
A former student of the École du Louvre, he is very interested in art and its relationship to money, which he believes won the game. “Recently, he continues, I discovered a remarkable documentary Savior of the worldwhich shows how the supposed fifteenth painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was sold for 450 million dollars [411 millions d’euros, NDLR] to a mysterious buyer. Since then, the painting has disappeared. It’s crazy, some works of art are no longer visible, locked in the safes of the free zones in Geneva, Dubai or Singapore. For some, art has become speculative. »
Two excellent actors
Which is not at all the case in A masterstroke, where the question posed is: how can Arthur help Renzo and vice versa? “We are witnessing a double rescue, adds Rémi Bezançon, because they have no choice if they want to get out of it. A daring stratagem will change everything. What to see that in the age of social networks and fake news, everything is possible to invent a legend.
The fact remains that the filmmaker does not openly criticize contemporary art or his circle of amazed fans as does, for example, the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund in the grating The Square. “I recognize that the film is very caustic on the subject but it does not make fun stupidly. For my part, I don’t want to criticize contemporary art for all that, it’s a bit easy. I go to the Venice Biennale every two years and if 80% of what I see is nonsense, the remaining 20% affect me. »
READ ALSOA very dark “Night of 12” A master stroke is carried by two excellent actors, Vincent Macaigne and Bouli Lanners, who know all the tricks and tricks of this sometimes tense confrontation. The first, who we will soon discover in the skin of the painter Pierre Bonnard in the new film by Martin Provost (January 2024), accentuates the human, generous and somewhat rogue side of his character.
The second, a former student of the Beaux-Arts in Liège, has returned to his passion in his former studio and slips with delight into the skin of this idealistic and gruff painter. The hand that we see painted in the film is therefore his. What add to the naturalness of his character and the authenticity of this touching comedy.
“A masterstroke”French film by Rémi Bezançon, with Vincent Macaigne, Bouli Lanners, Bastien Ughetto, 1:35, in theaters August 9.
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