New at the movies - "Black Friday for Future": social comedy from France
Bruno and Albert have endless debts. The first works and lives at Charles de Gaulle's Roissy airport in Paris and secretly sells the items confiscated there. The second is in a deep depression following a separation and the foreclosure of his house. More out of opportunism than conviction, the two join a group of climate activists.
Four years after "Everything but Ordinary", the successful directing duo Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache ("Pretty Best Friends") are back with their latest feature film"Black Friday for Future". After dealing with disabilities and autistic young people, their theme is now ecology, or more precisely: saving the planet that humans are destroying through unbridled consumption.
Bruno(Jonathan Cohen) and Albert (Pio Marmaï) are obviously more sensitive to free beer, potato chips and Kaktus (Noémie Merlant), the code name of the group's leader, than to the revolution. More out of politeness than anything else, the two take part in conferences and accept the nicknames Chick and Lexo. The movie trio works brilliantly.
To please Kaktus, Bruno and Albert get more and more involved: they smear the steps of the Trocadéro in Paris with red paint, occupy the Bank of France, block traffic and stop an airplane on the runway before take-off.
The social comedy begins with an amusing montage of New Year's speeches in which France's ex-presidents emphasize how difficult the past year was or how difficult the year ahead will be. The comedy is also called "Une année difficile" (A difficult year) in the original. It then starts with a lot of action: a department store is stormed because of Black Friday, which the group actually wanted to prevent.
Toledano and Nakache worked with activists from the radical environmental movement "Rebellion Against Extinction" for the film. Some of them were consulted during filming and also acted as extras.
"Black Friday for Future" is a successful combination of popular and political cinema - even if the story about destructive capitalism is sometimes somewhat naive in its depiction. True to themselves and their style, the directors embed major problems of our ultra-liberal society in a light-footed and original comedy that manages without cynicism.
"Black Friday for Future", France, 2023, 120 min., FSK 12+, by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, with Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, Noémie Merlant
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Source: www.stern.de
