It could be a compound word: “tchao-pantin”. The expression “doing a tchao-pantin” would then designate the maneuver by which a comedian would seize a tragic role to establish his status as a fully-fledged actor, often around his forties, as Coluche did, in Claude Berri’s film, in 1983. A few decades later, it was Franck Gastambide’s turn to try the exercise.
The mood of the interpreter and director of Kaïra, Pattaya, Taxi 5 turns black in this first feature film by Christophe Régin, which explores a vein hitherto little exploited by French cinema: the lowlands of the French soccer. The director and his interpreter extract a unique atmosphere from it, which permeates the entire film and hides its imperfections.
Franck (Gastambide) lives on the fringes of FC Nantes. On the face side, he contributes to the training of the young people of the training center. On the tails side, he serves as a chaperone for players who let themselves go a little, protecting them as best he can from the wrath of justice and the gaze of the media.
bitterness and innocence
Franck takes the club president (Hippolyte Girardot) as a lifeline. To this affable man, he attributes a paternal benevolence, which is only apparent. The return to the team of a player at the end of his career (Moussa Mansaly), who was at the same time as Franck one of the club’s hopes, forces the latter to take the measure of his failure. Franck Gastambide immediately finds the right tone to communicate this mixture of bitterness and childlike innocence, which forces his character not to give up.
Christophe Régin takes obvious pleasure in detailing the mechanisms of a brutal ecosystem, which torments bodies and egos. Shot in winter, his film is made up of too short days and endless nights, where everything goes wrong. Disorder, for Franck, has the face of Salomé (Alice Isaaz), a girl who goes from club to club, hoping to get something from the regular attendance of players. This female character is the most original of the film, far from the femme fatales of French noir cinema, and her interpreter breathes great energy into her. His role in the dramatic mechanics of The Penalty Area is less fortunate.
As comfortable as he is in portraying a condition, Christophe Régin (who is also the screenwriter of the film) is more borrowed when it comes to setting it in motion. The superhuman efforts that Franck makes to escape precariousness and destitution become more predictable – big scam, plans to escape abroad – and the film loses its singularity. Nevertheless, for an hour and a half, he gave an unprecedented reality and humanity to a situation that is often only glimpsed through the catchy headlines of sites specializing in celebrity escapades.