What is the connection between the owner of an art gallery who must run his business at all costs and his protege, a painter in the midst of a crisis of inspiration who refuses to sell his art to dealers? None, apparently. Between the conciliatory Arthur (Vincent Macaigne) and the radical Renzo (Bouli Lanners), everything is an excuse to bicker and patch things up. Everything separates them except a feeling stronger than themselves: friendship with a capital A, disinterested, spontaneous, obvious.
Adept of the formula of the comic duo, the white clown and the Auguste, synonymous with success – De Funès / Coluche, Ventura / Brel, Depardieu / Richard, Lhermitte / Villeret -, Rémi Bezançon makes his honey of it in Un coup de maître , his new film freely adapted from an Argentinian black comedy, Mi Obra Mestra (2018). It’s about art, of course, but also about a daring plan put together by Arthur to save his friend from shipwreck. Problem: Both will soon be overwhelmed by the situation.
Since his film debut, friendship has been Rémi Bezançon’s favorite theme. We had already noticed it in his cartoon Zarafa (2012) on the complicity between a young African slave and a giraffe, then in Ma vie en l’air (2005, with Marion Cotillard, Vincent Elbaz, Gilles Lellouche) and in Le Mystery Henri Pick (2019) which evoked the budding friendship of a man (Fabrice Luchini) and a woman (Camille Cottin).
“In Un coup de maître, underlines the filmmaker, I wanted to go further, to push this theme to the extreme to make it a kind of romantic comedy where two characters who are opposites are irremediably friends for life, to death. »
So here is Arthur trying to find an order for his friend Renzo and get him out of trouble. A mural painted for a large corporation does the trick, but the artist sabotages it at the last moment. Arthur, who has a gallery to run, does his best to help Renzo, but he comes up against a wall of incomprehension.
A former student of the École du Louvre, he is very interested in art and its relationship to money, which he believes won the game. “Recently, he continues, I discovered a remarkable Salvator Mundi documentary, which shows how the supposed fifteenth painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was sold for 450 million dollars [411 million euros, Ed] to a mysterious buyer. Since then, the painting has disappeared. It’s crazy, some works of art are no longer visible, locked in the safes of the free zones in Geneva, Dubai or Singapore. For some, art has become speculative. »
Which is not at all the case in A Masterstroke, where the question posed is: how can Arthur help Renzo and vice versa? “We are witnessing a double rescue, adds Rémi Bezançon, because they have no choice if they want to get out of it. A daring stratagem will change everything. What to see that in the age of social networks and fake news, everything is possible to invent a legend.
The fact remains that the filmmaker does not openly criticize contemporary art or his circle of amazed fans as does, for example, the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund in the squeaky The Square. “I recognize that the film is very caustic on the subject but it does not make fun stupidly. For my part, I don’t want to criticize contemporary art for all that, it’s a bit easy. I go every two years to the Venice Biennale and if 80% of what I see is nonsense, the remaining 20% ??affect me. »
The second, a former student of the Beaux-Arts de Liège, has returned to his passion in his former studio and slips with delight into the skin of this idealistic and gruff painter. The hand that we see painted in the film is therefore his. Something to add to the naturalness of his character and the authenticity of this touching comedy.
“Un coup de maître”, French film by Rémi Bezançon, with Vincent Macaigne, Bouli Lanners, Bastien Ughetto, 1:35, in theaters August 9.
