The heroics, the first feature film by young French director Maxime Roy, is overwhelming. In this social drama inspired by the real life of the main interpreter, François Créton, Roy exposes the tumultuous daily life of a man worn by alcohol and methadone who tries to pick up the pieces of his life torn between his eldest son Léo , the mother of her very young child and her dying father.
We are gripped from the very first scene. Michel Kowalski, the alter ego of François Créton (we want to see in this fictitious name a nod to the amphetamine racing driver driving to his loss in the cult film Vanishing Point), confides during a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The camera, discreet, is planted behind the dozen participants, the lens fixed on his emaciated face emerging over one shoulder. His testimony is crying out for truth; At 53, Créton (or Kowalski) is at the end of his rope, without a job, with a one-year-old child in his charge, of whom he does not have the courage to share custody with the one who left him shortly after the death. birth of the baby. On the verge of tears, the ex-junkie even comes to curse his abstinence.
All those close to him suggest that he “grow up”, finally. With his black leather jacket bearing the inscription ” LOSER on the back, the old punk, who speaks verlan (we have here the image of a lost Renaud), rides a motorcycle in an unrecognizable Paris. Along the way, we meet his eldest son, Léo (Roméo Créton, the authentic son of François and the brother of actress Lola Créton), Hélène (Clotilde Courau), his ex and the mother of the child, then of his father, Claude, interpreted by Richard Bohringer.
Of the story as such, there is after all little to say. For Michel, each day is enough for its trouble, and thus holds (very well) the scenario. Sometimes he parties with Leo’s friends, he goes to the unemployment office with his CV handwritten on a sheet of paper to be told that he must train as a mechanic in order to get a job as a repairman. of motorcycles. He picks up his baby to take him home, in this half-basement that looks like a squat.
Michel is also confronted with the fate that awaits his father. Between the lines of the story of this marginal, to whom we attach a lot despite his flaws, weaves that of the father-son relationship made delicate by the unenviable situation of the main character. Leo tries to distance himself from Michel, who holds his father responsible for his excesses, when he has to take care of a child he doesn’t want.
In an interview with Le Devoir, Maxime Roy recounted the genesis of his film, which was developed from the short documentary Beautiful Loser, he did about the real François Créton, and the latter’s relationship with his own dying father. “It’s all fiction, but it’s so much his life,” confided the director. And this is precisely what makes this film so moving, this fiction that we take for truth, this veil lifted on marginality and solidarity which sometimes appears, when Michel finds support from Josiane (Ariane Ascaride), wife of Claude, and of Jean-Pierre (Patrick d’Assumçao), speaker at Alcoholics Anonymous.