In forty years of cinema, to the rhythm of a film every two years, Robert Guédiguian has only very rarely filmed outside Marseille, Estaque, his childhood district, and without his loyal tribe.
In Twist in Bamako, he evokes the first years of Mali’s independence in the early 1960s, an enchanted parenthesis, a communist moment to use his expression, before the revolutionary utopia was misled.
“I have always considered that the revolution should also be about the celebration.”
Robert Guédiguianto franceinfo
Samba and Lara are young, in love, convinced that their life will be good in socialist Mali, he is a young activist of the cause, son of wealthy traders, she a villager who fled to Bamako after a forced marriage.
Stéphane Bak and Alicia Da Luz Gomes illuminate the film with their innocence, before reality suddenly catches up with them: patriarchal traditions and the authoritarian drift of the regime’s apparatchiks have in store for them a tragic fate, a la Romeo and Juliet.
Faithful to his sense of the cinematographic tale, Robert Guédiguian blithely mixes poetry and politics and he wants to rehabilitate with Twist in Bamako, in a universal language, those rare moments when the revolutions knew how to be beneficial and joyful.
It is the adaptation of the successful novel by Olivier Bourdeaut, which recounted at child level the life of the parents of Gary, a couple totally fucked up in France trapped after the war.
But here, it is the angle of the father who is chosen, Georges, Romain Duris, marries an elusive woman, met on the French Riviera. She constantly changes her name, flees the banality of everyday life and only wants to dance, drink champagne, the couple leads the way, offers sumptuous parties, never opens the mail.
When there is no more money, euphoria gives way to madness, to the tune of Mr Bojangles sung by Nina Simone, which gives Virginie Efira very beautiful scenes, but the film is much too frozen in the images of Epinal to find the magic of the novel.
For this film shot at his home in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, the filmmaker summons his memories of adolescence and his sense of the romantic to evoke the Californian youth of the 70s, after the first oil shock.
Gary, a 15-year-old high school student, falls in love with Alana, a much older assistant photographer. While the gasoline starts to run out, the duo moped in all directions on the air of the tubes of the time.
To embody this rather complicated love story, Paul Thomas Anderson cast Cooper Hofman, the son of Paul Seymour Hoffman, Paul Thomas Anderson’s favorite actor, who died 8 years ago, and Alana Haim, rock musician in the United States. . Bradley Cooper, Tom Waits, Sean Penn complete a baroque cast to serve a film of joyful nostalgia.