A meeting place for student filmmakers from all over the world, the Poitiers Film Festival begins this Friday. With each edition, a great opening film. This year, it is “Arthur Rambo”, the next feature film by Laurent Cantet, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2008, which recounts the descent into hell of a promising young novelist, also author of hateful tweets.
In his eyes, the pseudonym of Arthur Rambo was just a joke on Twitter, a hate character invented in adolescence, engaged in a race for the right word, the worst xenophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic insult, to make people laugh friends on social networks. But, when Arthur Rambo’s signed tweets emerge again a few years later, Arthur has become Karim D., a promising young adult and novelist. For an evening, his life changes from a young literary prodigy to an infrequent character.
The descent into hell of young Karim D. against a background of social networks is the subject ofArthur Rambo, the new feature film by Laurent Cantet, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2008 for Between the walls.
The film, presented this Friday evening at the opening of Poitiers Film Festival, the international festival of film schools, already caused a sensation at the festival in San Sebastian, Spain, at the end of September.
The film is inspired, in part, by the story of Mehdi Meklat in 2017, former journalist for Bondy Blog and France Inter. From this framework, Laurent Cantet invents the story of this young successful novelist and confronts him with the merciless world of social networks. Who is he really? The young literary prodigy that we discover at the beginning of the film or this hateful man, author of tweets each more filthy than the last? While the messages of congratulations give way to a surge online of disgust and dissociation towards the young man, the support will come from a novelist friend of the young Karim D., played by Anne Alvaro. “You are just learning”, she told him in substance.
In its direction, the film stays as close as possible to its character, who has just entered adulthood, confronts him with his contradictions, the scope of his words and his real intentions. The image is dressed in messages published on social networks, those that instantly make and break the glories. Laurent Cantet always manages to remain nuanced and delivers a social film that is both touching and terrible on the impact of social networks and the way in which we put ourselves into it individually.
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Arthur Rambo by Laurent Cantet is presented at 8:30 p.m. at the TAP theater in Poitiers, Friday November 26, 2021.
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