“Rumba la vie”: between melo and comedy, step of two by Franck Dubosc

The film of the actor and director assumes his fantasy on a serious subject, the reunion of a father and the daughter he had abandoned at his birth.

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Who does not know the particular signs of the Dubosc phenomenon? Mythomaniac seducer lined with a tender cheesy: the defrock sticks to him with the skin on the screen, such as the briefing to Patrick Chirac, his character in Camping, franchise by Fabien Onteniente produced by the Pathé house which offered ‘actor his flagship role in the cinema. The 5 million spectators of the first (2006), the 4 million in the second (2010) and the 3 million in the third (2016), despite the declining slope they suggest, are dispensing for a great commercial success. As for comic art, this thing so difficult to achieve in a form that is not degraded is another matter. Dubosc, we will allow ourselves to think so, was never more brilliant and hilarious than alongside Elie Semoun in the mirobolates classified ads, if not in their falls.

In any event, like Semoun and many other comics, the actor ended up going to the other side of the camera, without ceasing to be in front. His first test as a director, in 2018, was called everyone standing and he embodied, all shame, for ordinary ends of frantic flirt, a false paralytic. The film, of a very relative quality, had gathered 2.3 million spectators and confirmed the effectiveness of the impetrant director. The bronze law of show-business consisting in hitting iron when it is hot, it is in the ubiquitous position of the actor-director that Dubosc today returns to the controllers.

To try with Rumba the life a more daring bet, not to say more dangerous: to melt his character of congenital faces in a melodrama frame and try to delight the double painting of laughter and tears. Here’s how he does it. Tony, a school bus driver in the Oise, is a silent loner who missed his American dream. Mustache, Marcel, Tattoo of the star banner on the right arm, glove hair and pointed boots, he somehow lives the dreary triviality of his professional and sentimental life until the day when a infarction, and the subsequent pose of a few stents Suddenly change its existential perspectives. Father of a daughter whom he abandoned at birth twenty years ago, he found her in Paris Salon Dance Professor, and, on the precious advice of his friend and mechanic (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and a neighbor Compatiating who introduces him to Congolese rumba (Marie-Philomene Nga), is incognito to her course to meet her and make this reunion less brutal.

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/Media reports.