Just a few months after the release of the highly successful Le Procès Goldman, Cédric Khan is back with a radically different film, Making Of, a meta-comedy about the making of a film that goes awry. Scheduled for release on January 10.
The chaotic shoot is handled by Simon, a disillusioned filmmaker played by Denis Podalydès, who wants to adapt a news story about a factory strike and its subsequent takeover by the same employees. Except that the film's tragic ending doesn't please the financiers, who had been told it would have a happy ending, and, lo and behold, the biggest investor pulls out, jeopardizing the rest of the shoot. And that's not all: Simon also has to deal with his actors, including the eccentric Alain(Jonathan Cohen), a popular and unstoppable actor convinced he's got the role of a lifetime, and his technicians, who drop out of the project one after the other.
With its many characters, the film weaves together numerous plots, but never loses its legibility, which is its strength. Making Of is almost a choral film, and like the shoot it recounts, goes off in all directions. But what's a flaw in the fictional film is a quality in the real thing, since Cedric Khan's work is a delightful plunge behind the scenes of cinema, and its production is far less glamorous than one might think.
And since there are so many characters, the screenplay is clever enough to make its characters types who work very well in key scenes to elicit hilarity: the resigned producer, the big-headed actor, the making-of cameraman, who is at the center of the story. The film's characters are delightful, and their interactions are almost always a source of cacophony and shouting matches. Like the characters, we come away a little exhausted, but with a smile on our faces, because as Podalydès' character explains,"cinema is a hard drug".
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