Cinema: Gaël Lépingle, director with surprising and poetic look at rural world

“Boys from the provinces” and “Only pirates” are two feature films to discover indoors from Wednesday, February 1.

by Mathieu Macheret

It is a chic in reverse of ambient Parisianism that characterizes the filmmaker Gaël Lépingle that we meet in a café de la Place de la Bastille, in Paris: Titi cap screwed on the skull, checked shirt in colorful colors , boldly combining urban and country archetypes. Only Pirates (2018) and Boys from the provinces (2022), two of his feature films that come out grouped on Wednesday 1 , the “province” – whose term is explicitly preferred to More consensual “region” or “territory” – constitutes emotional geography. “Basically, it is less a decor than a suspected time, specifies the director of himself. The time of my adolescence, with the difficulty of finding an anchor in my time, living a lot by the proxy of the cinema or of literature. I have forged myself with a very nineteenth -century imagination ^{century, identifying myself with the heroes of Balzac or Maupassant, who went up to Paris. “}

The most recent boys of the provinces, says in three stories the argument of young gays in sleeping towns where desire must be lived between the lines. Only the pirates, shot in 2018 with his former comrades of the Orleans Conservatory (“It was a question of finding them: what had they become twenty years later?”), Chronicle the closure of a neighborhood theater under the Urbanization stroke.

Each time, Gaël Lépingle’s characters are ordinary people, this silent majority to which cinema pays little attention. “There was a brutal break in French cinema in the 1990s, he explains. I realized that the middle class of subdivisions – my parents, my neighbors – did not exist, while it was still Recovered, fifteen years earlier, by the Claire Devers, Gérard Frot-Coutaz or Jean-Pierre Limosin. This promise was broken, the cinema of French author no longer held it. “

Born in 1972, the filmmaker grew up “in a subdivision of the Orleans agglomeration. My mother, who was a teacher, he says, took us to see, my brother and me, political or committed films. And my Father showed us the Hollywood films of the 1950s. I then fix the costume: these virile actors who, in the films of capes and swords, wore boots and tights, that is, rather female attributes. When I pass the conservatory Dramatic art, what I like is to be able to become a knight – it’s Claudel or Victor Hugo! “

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