Tuesday, March 23, 2021

THE BIG HIT / UN TRIOMPHE - Film - European Film Awards


The Big Hit - Beckett’s Waiting for Godot


 The power of expression. Its bittersweet humanism flows effortlessly from its assured ensemble.


Perceiving existential parallels between the inmates’ experiences and Waiting for Godot, Étienne convinces the prison staff to let the troupe stage Samuel Beckett’s classic.


Offered a chance to get prisoners involved in drama, Étienne (Kad Merad), an actor out of work and no longer dreaming of big things, at first thinks he has met his match in the apathy, cynicism, and drug addictions of the only three prisoners to turn up. But Étienne’s predecessor had offered nothing more stimulating to work with than simple children’s stories with “morals” made plain: Aesop’s Fables. Realising that they need something that they can relate to, Étienne challenges his now five students to learn and rehearse a work offering many difficulties: Samuel Beckett’s “absurdist” play Waiting for Godot. Eventually persuading the chief warder, Ariane (Marina Hands), to seek the extraordinary concessions it will require, and his friend Stéphane (Laurent Stocker) to make his theatre available, Étienne finds he has more at stake than his students do to make a success of it.

The Big Hit makes great play of the eventual staging of Waiting for Godot and the effects of the prisoners’ efforts on themselves, their warders, their judges, and Étienne. But the film is about this less than it is about the power of encouragement and demonstrations of faith to revitalise lives that grief, ennui, and hopelessness had come to dominate. As well as depth of feeling, The Big Hit offers a good deal of clever comedy. And it manages all this with subtlety, lightheartedness, and great pacing.

A feel-good movie with broad audience appeal, Emmanuel Courcol’s The Big Hit is sure to be a festival big hit, one to laugh over later as well as to appreciate for its humane depiction of the difficulties that can land people in prison and those that follow them in there. And who knew that Waiting for Godot could be so captivating?


Etienne, an often out of work but endearing actor, runs a theater workshop in a prison, where he brings together an unlikely troupe of prisoners to stage Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot. When he is allowed to take the colorful band of convicts on a tour outside of prison, Etienne finally has the chance to thrive. 

Each date is a new success and a unique relationship grows between this ad hoc group of actors and their director. But soon comes the final performance in Paris. Will their last night together be the biggest hit of them all?

DIRECTORS STATEMENT

I didn’t want my wish for an authentic film about prison to abide by an aesthetic of a pseudo-documentary with a handheld camera or a messy environment and subdued lights. I wanted to create a dynamic camera, staying light and fluid, which can focus on inmates faces and Etienne’s. It should be attentive, waiting for moments of surprises and revelations in the narrow spaces of rehearsals. Theatre scenes answer to the closed universe of prison, they give an escape, an urban and rural perspective, they are likely to share with us the vertigo experienced outside by the prisoners. This vertigo is also present in Beckett's work, it shows us the absurdity of existence, expressed all the more strongly in the prison universe, as I felt it when I visited. It is indeed this Beckettian experience that I wish to share with the greatest number in this fully assumed, social and societal, serious and joyful comedy. I want for it to question us without didacticism on the necessity of confinement and the liberating power of culture.