Louise Bourgoin in a first film on death, full of fantasy

Emmanuel Laskar directs his first feature film in which he plays the role of a medium who does not assume responsibility.

Emmanuel Laskar, actor and director of the theatre company Les Chiens de Navarre, has made a sensitive and funny first feature film about mourning and the relationship we have with death. The Medium hits theaters on Wednesday, July 10.

Michael Monge (Emmanuel Laskar), in his forties, has just lost his mother, Barbara (Noémie Lvovsky), a medium in a small village in the Var, and also his girlfriend, who leaves him in the middle of the funeral.

Michael inherited his mother’s psychic gifts, but he has no desire to take up the torch, despite the insistence and desperation of his mother’s former patients.

His sister Myriam (Maud Wyler) would also like him to use his talents, but nothing and no one can convince him, until the day he meets Alicia (Louise Bourgoin), an artist convinced that she can feel the presence of her deceased architect husband in her magnificent villa.

With this first feature film, Emmanuel Laskar, already noted for his short film Calm downaddresses the issue of death and mourning in an offbeat tone. In the footsteps of this character of Mickael, an anti-hero with the appearance of a persistent, slightly awkward, shy teenager, the film takes us into a universe full of fantasy, melancholy and humor mixed together.

In the company of very much alive stylized “ghosts”, an unexpected romance is woven between two characters locked in mourning and solitude, in search of happiness off the beaten track. Everyone lives with ghosts, whose presence we must understand and accept, this naturalistic film in the form of a fable tells us in a parabolical way, which is reminiscent in this respect of the cinema of Éric Rohmer.

We become attached to the comforting nonchalance of Mickael, played by the director. Emmanuel Laskar does rather well in his dual role, on both sides of the camera. Louise Bourgoin sensitively embodies the character of Alicia, disarmed by a Mickael who is the polar opposite of her very self-assured late husband.

Stereotypes of the masculine and the feminine redrawn, Emmanuel Laskar deploys this story in a staging on the wire, taking the risk of sometimes slipping into the grotesque. But he manages to keep the rope in the right place almost throughout the film, playing the parody without falling into the caricature of a genre rarely explored from this angle. A poetic and touching version of “Exorcist”.

Gender : Comedy, Romance
Director: Emmanuel Laskar
Actors : Emmanuel Laskar, Louise Bourgoin, Noémie Lvovsky
Country : France
Duration : 1h 20
Exit : July 10, 2024
Distributer : Ad Vitam
Synopsis : Michael is having a lot of problems. He can’t accept his romantic breakup or his recently deceased mother’s legacy: the gift of communicating with the dead. Overwhelmed by his grief, he refuses to take on his vocation as a medium. But his meeting with Alicia, a young charismatic artist convinced of the presence of her deceased husband, will push him to change his mind…