2024-01-05 13:42:57
Film „Black Friday for Future“
“My psychologist says I’m suffering from climate panic”
As of: 12:42 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Cactus (Noémie Merlant, M.) fights for environmental protection
Source: © Weltkino Filmverleih
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When you fall in love with a climate activist, you become part of her world. This consists of blockages and the unpleasant feeling of being a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. The French comedy “Black Friday for Future” shows the extent to which “climate panic” can reach.
He’s a 10 but lives in Canada. She’s a 10, but a Schalke fan. “He/She is a 10, but” is the name of a popular TikTok game that uses thought experiments to determine which quality would minimize the attractiveness of a partner who is otherwise ideal in every respect and to what extent. For example, a 10 who doesn’t like dancing can quickly become a merely passable 6. In Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” adaptation, Ryan Gosling sings heartbreakingly, “Everywhere else I’d be a 10, but here I’m just Ken.”
The film “Black Friday for Future” (original: “Une année difficile”) asks what becomes of a 10 who turns out to be a climate activist. Because the beautiful woman (Noémi Merlant), who calls herself Cactus because every activist needs a nickname, does not just practice environmental protection as a nice hobby, but has dedicated herself body and soul to saving the earth. She keeps her apartment minimalistic, meaning she doesn’t have any furniture. She cannot accept gifts unless she gives up an old item for the new one. When guests come to visit, you just sit on the floor.
Minimalist activist apartment
Source: © Weltkino Filmverleih
When Albert (Pio Marmaï), who falls in love with Cactus, receives a message from her in the evening asking him to come over, he expects a spontaneous date. What he doesn’t count on are the twenty other activists who show up at the Impromptu meeting at the same time. Change is a collective effort. But the biggest hurdle only becomes apparent when Albert wants to kiss cactus. She can’t, flinches back.
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She later explains her distance: “My feelings are connected to the state of the world. With warming and impending doom. My psychologist says I’m suffering from climate panic. I feel like both a victim and a perpetrator.” The drama doesn’t expose these peculiarities, its view remains compassionate even when it exaggerates the characters into the odd.
Cactus, with her psychological disorder, is not the only type of climate activist the film knows. At the center are Albert and Bruno (Jonathan Cohen), both heavily in debt and addicted to consumerism, which is why they are attracted to the free beer and snacks available at the meetings. They use car barriers and sit-ins to collect bribes for passage. The climate protector as an emotionally mutilated do-gooder or a greedy fraudster? Luckily, all the characters seem so likeable that you don’t really blame them for one thing or another.
Crisis as a normal state
At the beginning, in a montage of various New Year’s speeches from 1974 to 2013, French presidents declare the past year to be a particularly difficult one. Does the crisis lose its crisis-like nature when it becomes normal? When blocking roads, being arrested at airports and accumulating debts are no longer the exception but the rule? Against this background, it seems appropriate to no longer task a romantic comedy with overcoming family boundaries, as was the case in Shakespeare’s time, but rather with dealing with tough, everyday catastrophes.
With their surprise hit “Pretty Best Friends” from 2011 about the touching friendship between a rich, white wheelchair user and his left-behind, black nursing assistant, the directing duo Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache managed to bring opposites together and say goodbye to taboos without any false shyness (like making jokes about disabled people). No longer looking for the differences in physical appearance, but in inner values, “Black Friday for Future” turns into a sometimes entertaining, but overall rather discouraged commentary on the zeitgeist.
If you’re expecting a precise study of the milieu, you’re better off with “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” For a snappy doomsday comedy, you’re better off turning to “Don’t Look Up,” which delivers a more insane parody of the current vulnerability imperative “Sick of myself”. “Black Friday for Future,” on the other hand, suffers from its own indecisiveness. Does the comedy try to highlight the contradictions in activist behavior, for example when Cactus sits in a huge old apartment but indulges in renunciation? Or is she trying to criticize a flawed system that produces such lifestyles? A 10 who doesn’t know what she wants is quickly just a 4.
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