Braquer Poitiers

Nickel plated feet more than bandits, Francis and Thomas kidnap Wilfrid, the owner of a carwash business, source of a few fistfuls of euros a day. Syndrome of Stockholm at work for Wilfrid, but in his own highly personal way, here he is, about to find pleasure in a situation he even enjoys in-depth theorizing about while uncertainty takes hold of the two buddies whose girlfriends have come to join them from the South. The plot moves on without any hurry, and without any more conviction than our two occasional thieves might have. A kind of atmospheric humor, if we may say so, is especially relevant here, related to Claude Schmitz’s accurate, sober and simply outstanding staging as much as it is to the main characters’ small troupe’s performance, all of them stunning, with Wilfrid as leader. If Breaking into Poitiers is so hilarious, it isn’t because it deliberately seeks comic effects, that reply or gag hitting the bull’s eye, but the display of a realistic form taken through sand paper and kept in check with as much calm determination as outrage, as in that spoken moment in a well-known song by Brel. With remarkable discretion, and almost self-prohibition, a prudish form of grace is really at stake here. Granting himself the freedom of evocation without any sham or casualness, the business we are mainly concerned with here is what we do in our time. Here is the middle class (pretty much all of us) in a portrait: once in the part-time thieves’ blunted inoperative condition; then again, in that boredom of freewheeling youth and, finally, and the most surprising one, in that passion, a discursive one at least, of a second-hand poet. (JPR)