Piles of used and discarded objects open the film's opening credits; a man walks along the edges of the highway dressed in a white robe and terrycloth slippers from a luxury hotel.

He arrives at a community run by his sister Monique who immediately recognizes Jacques whom she had not heard from in two years.

Moved, she immediately welcomes him into the mess hall where all the community staff are eating, surprised by this unusual figure for the place experienced by people in need, left on the margins of society.

Jacques has just run away without pay from a hotel and has not seen his sister since his parents had removed him from home by virtue of his behavior aimed only at cheating them and living comfortably on their savings.

The waffling brother, puts his human vulgarity to work to induce his sister and local co-workers, already challenged by life, to pursue through cosmetic surgery a "radically" renewed appearance to enable him to pursue the dream of success and career.

A sneaky, daily, silly and superficial work of persuasion will enable him to organize a trip of hope to Bulgaria, where low-cost cosmetic surgery will enable miraculous results such as making a shabby elderly gentleman a famous soccer player.

The trip is conducted in a truck set up as an airplane and continues in a wedding limousine outfitted with a collage of more or less homemade bodywork.

The surreal, ironic, tragicomic dynamic of this tour also includes a visit to the Buzludzha, the huge amphitheater/monument erected in the early 1980s by the Bulgarian Communist Party in the heart of the Balkans.

Delépine and Kervern-experts in socially motivated cinema, where the dynamics of unemployment, exploitation, labor and the workings of capitalism are explored-do not hesitate this time either to treat the subject surprisingly effectively precisely by virtue of the bizarre and grotesque portrayal.

The film was shot inside the Emmaus community in Lescar Pau, southern France, with the faces and bodies of people evidently surviving precisely by virtue of a reality that welcomed them and recovered them to work, recognition and integration.

Nonsensical dialogues, unpredictable quotations those of Jacques, who for his sister has a disorder that needs to be cured, that of compulsion and unscrupulous obsession to become a billionaire by deceiving by any means every poor Christ he meets... while the community gathers people from different backgrounds and from the most disparate situations to enable them to become aware of social injustices and to recover work by sharing common goals in the fight against all kinds of injustice and by making sure that the poor can still become builders of their own future. Monique keeps the ashes of her dead parents in the family's Simca, the only property she has recovered and preserved as a meeting place with her loved ones who taught her what it means to be a communist.

A series of eccentric characters lead to a surprising ending by which the goal of aesthetic beauty is reversed to that of ethical presentability.

Jacques is the personification of headless capitalism, willing to psychopathically employ any means to achieve the goal of profit. He is the embodiment of the induction of need by which the system deviously manipulates consciences to preserve itself and to keep individuals subservient.

It is the pathological and preordained integration of its consumers, estranged from choice, as victims of the needs aroused and determined by the market and profit, made passive and heterodirected, nullified as persons and reduced to a shapeless mass of miserable consumers.

No reality can be immune to this, not even that of a community that makes life in the service of others its program.

No one like Kervern and Delèpine succeeds in dealing with such fundamental and now invisible themes with the acute lightness of a focused gaze on the problem; the tragicomic and surreal narrative insinuates itself with precision and absolute drama on the capitalist system, dissecting as one does through an autopsy examination the neoplasia that devours the cells of now inoperable organs. Feature films like MRIs of a system so compromised that they invite thunderous, explosive, inevitable laughter...

The sarcasm of those who know how to operate the double gaze that stares at horror, stands up to it and plays dice with it.

The cinema of the absurd that speaks the true, the cinema of joy that announces the tragic, the cinema of levity that embodies the abysmal distance.

What Nietzsche said about the ancient Greeks could be repeated for these magicians of representation:

only true artists know how to be superficial by depth: "to live, it is necessary to arrest oneself animatedly at the surface; at the ripple, at the zest, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, sounds, words, the whole Olympus of appearance!"

The cinema of the depth of the surface, of a will to the surface that by no means "superficial" conceals instead the awareness proper to those who have dared to cast their gaze into the abysmal face of existence and the system.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice