RICORDA TI CHE E UN FILM COMICO

“This is the story of things, actions and thoughts, from the general to the specific, from the personal to the political”. This is how the colourful Ricorda ti che e un film comico opens, following César Vayssié’s heady poetical-political experiments that began with UFE (FID2016). Alix Boillot, Noémie Develay-Ressiguier, Ferdinand Vayssié, Théodora Marcadé and Gaël Sall have gathered together in the legendary Belvedere Hotel in Cebere on the French-Spanish border to put on a show, a production that is itself the subject of the play performed in front of an audience and during which the film was shot. Once again, the film and stage director explodes the logics of cinematic recording. He stages a silent choreography of bodies, to which the spoken word is added afterwards for the film. This discrepancy between the time of the recording, the body and the spoken word is the ideal space for burlesque and poetic narrative inventions. Ricorda ti che e un film comico is a joy to listen to: its libidinal drive is language, freewheeling, jubilant and delightful, with cheeky ideas, rhymes and comical, hard-hitting rejoinders. All today’s topical subjects are grist for the mill of Vayssié and his actors – desire, the fluidity of identities, horizontality and the collective, art and politics, art and the climate catastrophe, art and… so on. What would a political community look like when measured against the yardstick of artistic creation? The troublemakers get down to it with gusto, using the grotesque “Beethoven blueprint” for their methodology - the need to ‘go in blind’ in a crazy world where “everything’s on fire”. It’s hilariously desperate and above all, desperately hilarious.

Claire Lasolle