Variety Critics' Choice 2016 / Je me tue à le dire / Belgium, France 2016
Michel is the prototype of the outsider. On top of that he’s an inveterate hypochondriac obsessed with visions of death. And why wouldn’t he be, when he’s pathologically dependent on his self-centered mother, a woman who endured cancer and will speak of nothing else. This markedly stylized work serves up a litany of wild and absurd situations with sophisticated humor.
A hirsute sad sack’s inability to escape a monumentally needy mother – or his own paranoid fixations on mortality – are the stuff of idiosyncratic comedy in this debut narrative feature. Not so far-flung from the fate-controlled, aggressively quirky cinematic universe of fellow Belgian Jaco Van Dormael, Xavier Seron nonetheless gives this black-and-white tale its own distinctive aesthetic and tonal character. Our first glimpses of Michel (Jean-Jacques Rausin) are as a babe suckling at his mother’s ample breast and as a 37-year-old adult trying on a coffin for size – signposts of a character whose present-tense life goes nowhere while he continually obsesses over its origin and demise. An unsuccessful aspiring actor, Michel despairs of his general stasis, dividing his free time between his mom and his equally dependent girlfriend, setting up inventive scenes based around off-kilter character dynamics and other incongruous elements.
Dennis Harvey
90 min / Black & white, DCP
Director Xavier Seron
/ Screenplay Xavier Seron
/ Dir. of Photography Olivier Boonjing
/ Music Thomas Barriere
/ Editor Julie Naas
/ Art Director Erwan Le Floc’h
/ Producer Olivier Dubois, Bernard De Dessus Les Moustier, Tobina Joppen, François Cognard
/ Production Novak Production
/ Coproduction 38 Prods.
/ Cast Jean-Jacques Rausin, Myriam Boyer, Serge Riaboukine, Fanny Touron, Franc Bruneau
/ Sales Stray Dogs
Xavier Seron, Belgian filmmaker, first studied law. A change of interest led him in 2001 to enroll at L’Institut des arts de diffusion (IAD), a leading Belgian film school of the L’Académie Louvain, where he currently teaches. His short graduation picture Rien d’insoluble (2006) screened at the festival in Venice, and his second short effort Le crabe (2007, co-dir. Christophe Hermans) took an award at the Premier Plans IFF in Angers, France. He has contributed to several short documentary and narrative films as screenwriter and director (Mauvais lune, 2011; Dreamcatchers, 2012; L’ours noir, 2015). Death by Death is his writer-director debut in features.
Stray Dogs
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Phone: +33 (0)1 42 41 31 80
E-mail: [email protected]
Nathan Fischer
Distributor, Sales Agent
Julie Naas
Film Editor
Xavier Seron
Film Director
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