For the cinema release of his new film “Les Olympiades”, we had the chance to meet Jacques Audiard. The opportunity to evoke this romantic comedy far from its usual register, its relationship to Paris as a city of cinema, its taste for the staging of romantic discourse …
Jacques Audiard back to business
After The Sisters Brothers, his American western with Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, the director Jacques Audiard is back to the cinema with a surprising film. The Olympics, co-written with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, immerses us in the Parisian district of the same name, the beating heart of the 13th arrondissement. The sentimental daily life of three young people takes place there, Émilie (Lucie Zhang), Camille (Makita Samba) and Nora (Noémie Merlant).
The film, adapted from a comic book trilogy by Adrian Tomine, is revealed in its synopsis as banal as it is mysterious.
Paris 13th district of the Olympiades. Emilie meets Camille, who is attracted to Nora who herself crosses paths with Amber. Three girls and a boy. They are friends, sometimes lovers, often both.
The Olympics, like a “first film”
While the director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and of A prophet A formidable filmography has been built up until then in which we watched the men fall, he ventures here in a new register for him. The Olympics is indeed a romantic comedy, resolutely modern, with actors for the most part still inexperienced. Without tragedy, by capturing a form that has become rare in carelessness and the energy of amorous youth, the film is a triple urban and authentic portrait of our time. The result is a healthy breath of fresh air and a very successful cinema gesture.
Presented at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and then at the Angoulême Festival, it is at the latter that we were able to meet Jacques Audiard and talk to him about this different film, which he sees almost as a “first film”, of its roots in the Olympiades district, its poetic black and white, its relationship to romantic discourse and eroticism.
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