A couple of butchers kill vegan activists to serve them as ham to their customers: the comedy Barbaque, in theaters Wednesday, will not fail to talk, between pear and dessert.
Director of Starting point (2010), The Botswanga Crocodile (2012), and Coexist (2017), who each had fun with questions of identity or religion, Fabrice Eboué, who grew up in Normandy in a Franco-Cameroonian family, once again tackles a sensitive subject.
In the film (1h32, forbidden to under 12s), Fabrice Eboué plays Vincent, a traditional butcher who is struggling to make ends meet. Until the day when the shop, which he runs with his wife Sophie (Marina Foïs), is attacked by a commando of vegan activists, a way of life that strictly refuses the consumption and exploitation of animals.
By accident, Vincent kills one of them. The body, which he does not know what to do with, ends up in the ham slicer. Slices of vegan tasty at will, that Sophie, unaware, will sell for the delight of customers. This is the starting point of a crazy criminal outfit during which the couple will hunt dozens of vegans, from green festivals to vegetarian restaurants.
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The latter are far from the only ones to take it for their rank in this film which also tackles, joyfully and without fear of the politically incorrect, the drifts of the industrial butchery, the ordinary racism and the hysterization of the public debate. .
Beyond food, the film “talks about the communitarianism of our time“, explains the 44-year-old director, who sees in the speech of certain vegan activists a risk of” cancel culture, with a whole section of French gastronomy that risks going into the trash“.”Somewhere, it touches the sacred“, adds Fabrice Eboué who says he was struck, during a barbecue, to see a guest refuse to eat mushrooms on the pretext that they had touched a chicken – an anecdote which inspired a scene in the film.
“I wanted to laugh at these debates today which do nothing at all between hysterical vegans and gruff butchers“.”I am not vegan (and) my goal is not to collect“, he specifies.
To maintain total freedom of tone, the one who takes the cult comedy of Benoît Poelvoorde as an unsurpassable model It happened close to you (1992) chose to take on the lead role himself. At the same time, he is preparing to return to the stage, where he started, for his next show in January.