Tag Archives: Benoît Poelvoorde

In a nutshell: Depardieu on a massive motorbike is on the roads of Charente Maritime but times have changed and it isn’t an easy ride. A bitter-sweet road-movie with moments of horridness, and flickers of grace.

Gustave Kervern et Benoît Delépine en sont à leur quatrième film dur, tendre, décalé, abrasif et foutraque : celui-ci se nomme Mammuth, du nom de la moto allemande sur laquelle Serge Pilardos (Gérard Depardieu), nouveau retraité, parcourt les routes de Charente Maritime à la recherche des fiches de paye manquantes qui lui permettraient de toucher une retraite complète. Pilardos est lui-même d’une rotondité pachydermique et d’une époque quasi préhistorique car il est net qu’il ne comprend plus, s’il n’a jamais compris, ses contemporains. Accompagné dans sa quête amère, décousue, et ses rencontres lamentables par le fantôme de son premier amour (Isabelle Adjani), il finit par trouver une forme de paix intérieure et de regain d’amour pour ses proches, tant Miss Ming, sa nièce excentrique, qu’il retrouve enchanté, que Catherine (Yolande Moreau), son épouse bougonne et patiente.

C'est çui caddie qui y est

Depardieu est à tout point de vue monumental dans ce film, tant il impressionne d’abord par son tour de taille plus généreux encore que sa coupe de longs cheveux blonds filasses qui flotteront au vent sur son marcel défraichi. Mais aussi car dans ce film il est avec générosité un monstre de tendresse, de retenue, de pudeur. Le voir contempler de longues minutes silencieuses son puzzle de neuf cents pièces, cadeau d’adieu de ses anciens collègues de l’abattoir, est un moment épatant de cinéma sur lequel on n’aurait pas forcément parié sur le papier. Sa lourdeur touchante dans un grand moment de maïeutique orchestré par un des ses anciens patrons interprété par Siné amuse et serre le cœur. Son étonnement et sa méfiance mélancolique, puis son émerveillement face aux singularités de sa nièce résument bien les jolies émotions de ce gros homme simple, en mal d’amour.

C’est vraiment l’acteur des grands jours auquel on a droit, il s’était fait rare. Dommage que la réalisation ne soit pas à sa hauteur, l’image est assez laide, souvent floue, rarement bien cadrée, le scénario est moins une histoire qu’une lente suite d’instants plus ou moins drôles, plus ou moins choquants, souvent désespérés et miteux. On se demande parfois quelle nécessité à garder certaines scènes « grolandaises », comme par exemple la perturbante masturbation mutuelle de Pilardos et son cousin, dans un cadre plus poétique et plus socialement juste entre Jarmush et The Wrestler d’Aronofski. On se perd donc à rechercher les intentions des réalisateurs, intentions parfois péniblement surlignées, parfois étrangement absentes. Finalement un résultat correspondant assez au parcours du personnage : on croit partir en motard sur Munch Mammuth et on revient en djellaba à vélomoteur ! Mais changé et, en dépit de tout, assez satisfait des deux ou trois moments de grâce rencontrés.

En résumé: Gérard est splendide et mammouth dans ce film par moments tendre et drôle, mais le plus souvent rebutant et lent.

Prior to Mammuth, the last film I’d seen directed by Gustave Kerven and Benoît Delépine was the searingly fabulous Louise Michel, also starring Yolande Moreau. The bar was therefore set good ‘n high for this new production, even if my expectations were a bit lowered due to the odd damp squib of a warning review. Some people equally took exception to all of the directors’ rich and famous mates cameo-ing in the film as regular proletariat folk and insultingly playing people who are objectively and exclusively totally off their trees. Still, I was hoping for elements of the same vengeful humour, daring characterisation and unpredictably explosive storyline that Louise-Michel touted. Mammuth is a road movie featuring the truly mammoth Gérard Depardieu as Serge Pilardos, and this time he’s replete with greasy crimped peroxide blonde waist-long hair, immense beer belly and a perpetually lost demeanour. It all begins abrasively, with grainy-shot slabs of recently slaughtered meat and shredded pig rolling out across an abattoir from where Serge is about to retire. Cue striking scene of his colleagues obliviously shovelling piles of crisps into their mouths with blood dripping off their fingers as Serge listens impassively to his manager reading him a generic ‘thank you – goodbye’ retirement speech before presenting him with a parting shot giant jigsaw puzzle gift.

Serge ekes out his life sharing a small provincial whitewashed bungalow with his wife Catherine (Yolande Moreau), who often has some trouble dealing with his chaos, and indeed seems to be the only person around remotely capable of doing so. He’s mostly stuck on another planet. His idea of an appropriate response when a man drops dead in his isle at the supermarket where he’s picking up some groceries, and where his wife works, is to poke at him with a baguette before walking off. Serge quickly discovers that his retirement is going to be in jeopardy if he can’t get an official signature from every place he’s ever worked in his life to prove that he’s entitled to a pension. Catherine duly sends him off, armed with her mobile phone, on his giant hulk of a motorbike, ‘Mammuth’, to track down each and every one of his former employers. It all gets a bit Broken Flowers at this point, with a linear process to follow in terms of tracing his life backwards, and getting to witness some of the mess he’s left behind him over the years. He’s been spending the last thirty-odd years fighting his demons, ever since being responsible for a motorcycle accident that killed his fiancée, whose bloody face haunts him constantly (played by Isabelle Adjani).

"It was this big"

He goes from grave diggers to fairground owners, to derelict roadside cafés, gets abused, laughed at, occasionally helped but scammed and swindled, laughed at, and is involved in a horrific, out of the blue, far-too-much-information-here ‘cousin to cousin’ masturbation scene. A reunion with his grown niece, who likes to scare off potential employers by telling them that she writes poems in her menstrual blood, finally helps him to get over the loss of his fiancée. To say that it doesn’t hang together as well as Louise Michel would be putting it mildly. The pace is much slacker, the storyline more bleary-eyed, the humour’s largely absent and replaced by flat out gross stuff, but there’s some strong characterisation for Gérard who puts in a cracking, indeed ‘brave’ performance. Just so too very much information at times though… Bleargh.