“Problems,” on OCS Max: The Anti-Globalization Struggle, New Fertile Ground for Comedy

OCS MAX – Friday 17 March 21:00 – FILM

It is empty. The average French family abandons their festive road to stop in a Zadist community. Zhanna, the mother, a super bubbly young woman (Celia Rosic), is invited by her former yoga teacher, one of the founders of the movement. Victor (Eric Judor), the father, a computer scientist, follows her, while their teenage daughter is horrified at the thought that she will have to leave her iPhone at the camp entrance as a zone charter. The waves demand it.

Far from abstract idiocy Only twoor even The infernal tower of Montparnasse, problems Fascinated by its need to fit perfectly into a reality that is both mediated and polarized and rarely supported by fiction. The authors, Eric Joudor, Noé Debré, a screenwriter close to Jacques Audiard, and Blanche Garden, are inspired by the spirit of the times (they say they frequented Nuit Debout). In this society of odds and ends, subsuming the family to the norms of consumer society (an old green hippie, a vengeful feminist, a pseudo-shaman, an ex-jihadist…), they offer themselves a fertile field for comedy.

Hobbes’s tale

Anti-globalization folklore serves up a series of scams that essentially aim for the spirit of seriousness and the judgmental tone of militant rhetoric. Between the “rules discussion group,” this “kid” who remains free to define his gender, the obligation to treat animals politely, and the general environmental lexical terrorism, we laugh a lot in the first part of the film. , which sets the scene.

Kidnapped by a pretty girl on reality TV with a smuggled smartphone, we learn a few days later that a pandemic has wiped out a large portion of the world’s population. News is like an electric shock. Although the area is miraculously protected from the virus and its inhabitants are forced to restore civilization by force of circumstances, the masks fall and the film takes on a Hobbesian tale in which the instinct for conservation, the desire. The will to power for property sidestepped the wonderful collectivist and pacifist principles around which the group was built.

If this vision of human nature does not undoubtedly testify to a mad belief in Utopia, it would not be appropriate to see in it a desire to insult the action of collectives in struggle. Backed by a despotic feminist played by Blanche Gardin and this Victor, whose blandness cruelly hides a predatory background (whom Eric Judor miraculously manages to empathize with in his malice), he is more or less free to have fun with them. .