Six years later Asphalt (2015), and four years after his last film Dog (2017) of which Vincent Macaigne bore the main role, Samuel Benchetrit returns on the screens with This music doesn't play for anyone. Director, but also writer, screenwriter and theatre writer, he finely incorporates all the arts into this new film with sparkling casting. As part of the 4th edition of the Brussels BRIFF where the film was screened in preview on September 4, we had the chance to talk with him.
A hymn to encounters and poetry
This title was born fifteen years ago. One night when Samuel Benchetrit dined at the restaurant and was bored to die, he heard in the toilet an impromptu Schubert coming out of the loudspeakers. He says inwardly: « this music does not play for anyone », before writing in a small notebook, still far from imagining that it would be the title of one of his films years later...
Filmed in 2019 in Dunkirk, this film features several comical and moving life paintings, mostly those of tenderly hearted malfrats. What could be the premise of the film then sounds like a nice reminder bite: love can knock on the door of anyone, anytime. In the local supermarket, in a house that isn't ours, on a scene we never thought of playing.
« I wanted to make a movie about my father's friends. My father was a factory worker. When I was a kid, I saw the whole bunch of buddies who were tough people become graceful when they gave up on a form of tenderness. I wanted to reveal the little flower they have in them »
Remember?Asphalt, released in 2015, whose poetry died on screen, even in scenes of loneliness and boredom: the director has this gift to make the ordinary dreamic, constantly poetizing the hazards of life.
Mixing the improbable
A Vanessa Paradis who can only speak normally when she plays Simone de Beauvoir, a Bouli Lanners who constantly meditates against a grill. A most pragmatic JoeyStarr, a Ramzy alias Neptune, a Jules Benchetrit in hard to cook, and a François Damiens to whom we learn to recite Alexandrians... the gap is omnipresent.
« I didn't ask myself any storage questions about the movie. It's as if I had rented an apartment, and I'd been told there will be all the styles. I never stopped being free. I wanted to be free all the time. »
It feels like she's taking freedom. The film is full of references from theatre to literature, from cinema to music. Musics all more eclectic than each other, ranging from opera to France Gall, from Baschung to piano. All the arts intertwine, like the story that intertwines fates that intertwine - the subject dear to the director. In Asphalt, the starting point of each meeting of the six characters (including that of a NASA astronaut and an Algerian mother of the warmest), let's remember, was only a simple broken elevator. This film is, in short, both in terms of the choice of actors and references, a heteroclite mixture of life fragments by Samuel Benchetrit, deliberately putting coherence in the closet.
« We know that a bunch of friends are quite different people. My friends don't look alike. They are often all I am not me. I composed a kind of skewer that represents a little of my life, where I need it. »
François Damiens, towards the end of the film, will pronounce this sentence: « You see, like this music. We're here to listen to him. But if there's no one, no one to hear it... is it still there? ». Essential phrase, since the film constantly points at what the director calls a « Taoist philosophy »born in Asia. If a tree falls into a forest and nobody is there, is there any noise, or not? The answer depends only on our point of view, on our relationship to the world at the time we are being asked. If the director has given himself a lot of freedom, he gives just as much to his spectators... This music doesn't play for anyone is to be found in dark rooms on September 29.
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