With his last film revealed during the week of criticism in Cannes, Stéphan Castang gives the metaphor of social violence. At the crossroads of genres, Vincent must die the Octopus d'or FEFFS. You will find our video review and exchange with the director at the end of the article (and NIFFF Q&A) Here) . What if a simple look at our next ones starts wanting to kill us wildly?
Eyes revolver
Sometimes the simplest synopsis is the best. With its concept first announced by its title, Vincent must die based on an elementary grammar. Regardless of the causes of such an epidemic and the modes of spread, the fantastic assumption is that it is necessary in the first few minutes. While Vincent works at the office with his colleagues, he is violently assaulted by the new intern who is said to be exhausted and on the edge of the burn out. An act of seemingly free in this cool start-up universe, while their exchanges were simply summarized to a joke that fell by water in the morning. From the colleague to the postman, he followed a series of attacks for poor Vincent, camped by Karim Leklou (A Prophet, The Third War, BAC North), totally in the character's skin.
With his bonhommie and his imposing physics, however ordinary, this is the figure of the « Mr. All the World », away from the bodies of models that another part of French cinema loves. It is neither a hero nor a rain; He is himself, with his flaws and that's all. Very quickly, the film takes on a completely different dimension as early rules emerge in the eruption of violence. Through a cluster of clues and a clinical-comic analysis of his situation, Vincent refuses to take a victim position. He understands very quickly that he is a priori alone against everyone. Ironically, our hero despite him is rushed to the bottom of the scale where his encounter with a former homeless teacher and a waitress in a galley will change his destiny. It's a « great classic of conspiracy cinema [which] brings the salvation of the characters to the margin » explains Stephan Castang.
Man is a wolf for Man
In watermark, we understand that this violence that we might think free betrays a sick society in the pure Hobbesian tradition. Violence is as much an outlet as a relief valve of lambdas struck by human-blind capitalism. This is the violence at work symbolized by the hypocrisy of the gameopen-space where Vincent became a pariah, even though he was the victim of assaults by his peers on multiple occasions. It is that of racist media that vomit their venom daily to instil hatred. There is finally this « legitimate violence » dislodged and brandished as a totem to better break down the admins, bodies and beings, by the police becoming the armed arm of capital. This almost subliminal image appears fleetingly on Vincent's social networks but remains rooted in our retinal memory. Like Mithridate, which took its daily dose of poison, we acclimatized to the banality of horror.
The viral peak is probably reached with the sequence of the supermarket where a tide of customers melts on Vincent. It is the very illustration of the consumer society that destroys the other. It would be wrong to believe that violence is only individual, it is primarily systemic. Mathieu Naert, screenwriter of the film, abounds in this reading but rejects the individualistic determinants that would come back to validating the smoking theory of « Immunity » of societyThe Minister of the Interior does not like:
« Maybe it's about loneliness. Solitude makes you paranoid and suspicious. All the forces we see in the various facts are people who are completely alone. Our society creates solitude in an industrial way, and we reap the fruits. »
Violence is not a choice, it is subjected and has infiltrated everywhere until it contaminates the beings who obey it as possessed. Yet the director refuses to borrow the aesthetics of zombie films, even if Romero's teachings are part of the DNA of the film. Stéphan Castang flirts with the records and we want to give him reason when he explains « that we had to stay loyal to the genre codes and that at the same time, it wasn't really a genre film. ». Paradox of violence, we are our own executioners, both actors and victims of an unwavering system.
While it is true that this feature film borrows here and there from elements of popular culture, in the image ofInvasion Los Angeles of the Carpenter, Stephan Castang proposes his own vision between satire, tragedy and post-apo survival films. Yet the director does not choose a vision as pessimistic as that of The Road and its videoludic avatar The Last of us. The irony of the situation is omnipresent and serves as a revealing as he rightly suggests:
« The film is not post-apocalyptic, rather pre-apocalyptic, one could almost say that it is an intimate apocalypse. »
I'm here, you're not alone.
We feel that the world of Vincent must die is at the dawn of another possible. It's by closing our eyes that we reconnect with our next ones. It is almost the mythological image of Perseus and Medusa that petrified mortals. To defeat the gorgone, one must refuse to see horror. One could multiply references to Greek mythology, from Cassandre to Orpheus and so many other symbolic figures.
In the midst of this incomprehensible epidemic, Vincent finds salvation with a waitress whom he might never have looked at without the evil fate that fell upon him. This touching relationship with Margaux is accurately written and brilliantly embodied by Vimala Pons. If it is a perilous exercise to integrate new protagonists in half of a film, the actress manages by her charisma and spontaneity to make us immediately cling to her cabossed character. « It's a love story that escapes the codes of rose water. They're shipwrecked. » Tells Stephan Castang.
Without turning into nihilism and despite the title of the film, who takes moral injunctions with the verb duty, rather than collective suicide, is it not above all a story of resurrection? Without turning into a beat optimism, the epilogue is a parenthesis, a moment suspended in a world that has lost all capacity to retreat and introspect about what destroys it from within. An original and intelligent film, expected in the room on November 15, 2023.
Criticism of Vincent must die
Stephan Castang , director of Vincent must die
Filmmaker and actor born in 1973, Stéphan Castang has a crossroad between theatre and cinema. In the theatre, he played with Marion Guerrero, Benoît Lambert, Ivan Grinberg and Thomas Poulard. He worked with the company. Artifice as an actor or playwright and is also author of texts for the theatre. He is a lecturer at the Université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and in Paris VIII. As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed several short films. Winner 2021 of the Gan Film Foundation, Vincent must die is his first feature film.
Filmography
- 2023 : Vincent must die
- 2020: Final
- 2016 : Pantheon Discount
- 2015: End of campaign
- 2014: Service included
- 2011: French Youth
Interview with Stephan Castang
Trailer
I loved this movie at NIFFF! Thank you for this complete article and these videos 😉