(AFP) – Carried by Virginie Efira under the pen of a screenwriter from the “Bureau des Légendes”, the series “Tout va bien” successfully takes up a perilous challenge: recounting with humor and without pathos one of the worst ordeals that can be going through a family, a child’s cancer.
This ambitious work (8×52 minutes), available Wednesday on Disney+, follows the Vasseur clan, devastated by little Rose’s leukemia, awaiting a bone marrow transplant at the Robert-Debré hospital in Paris.
Despite the disaster, daily life continues as it does, for the little girl’s optimistic grandmother (Nicole Garcia), a personal development guru whose publisher is caught up in the Metoo wave, as well as for her devoted aunt (Virginie Efira), mother-in-law tormented by her partner’s ex.
Locked in a form of denial and unable to share her pain with her husband, her mother (Sara Giraudeau) takes refuge in the arms of one of the clowns (Mehdi Nebbou) populating the pediatric wards.
The title of the series is obviously “ironic”, as its creator Camille de Castelnau recalled at a press conference, fascinated by the “friction” between an “extremely abnormal and distressing situation” and “the rest of the world which gives the ‘feeling of continuing to run normally’.
A gap that she knows well, having experienced it herself when her own niece fell seriously ill. “It’s been years of testing,” explains the co-writer of “Bureau des Légendes” to AFP, who “always writes to convey emotions.”
“I wanted to talk about this moment of crisis” without falling into pure tragedy, like real life where “we sometimes laugh at times when we shouldn’t”, like during funerals, adds this admirer of the series “Six Feet Under” or “Big Little Lies”.
If the first two episodes are directed by the creator of “Bureau des Légendes”, Eric Rochant, and we find Sara Giraudeau, his unforgettable spy Marina Loiseau, the two series do not have much in common, warns Camille from Castelnau. If it is not the same “requirement on the writing, the casting”.
– “audacity” –
The result is a dramatic comedy like few in French production – more focused on family stories “for the whole family” – and which it would be wrong to avoid because of its subject.
“It never falls into pathos,” argues Alyosha Schneider, who plays Rose’s fickle uncle, to AFP. “I laughed a lot while reading the script and watching the series,” as well as during filming.
“As soon as I stumbled over a word, I absolutely couldn’t count on him because he started laughing,” Virginie Efira confirmed to the press, recalling her “small family bond” with Niels Schneider’s brother, his companion in the city.
Seduced by the “ferocity” and “writing” of Camille de Castelnau, the actress who won a César this year for “Revoir Paris” returns to the small screen, where she started as a host, after brief forays into series ” Kaamelott” and “Ten percent”.
And salutes in passing the “freedom” and “audacity” allowed by Disney+, more advanced “than in certain films in the way we can produce today”.
The platform, which continues to expand its range of French productions after the historical drama (“Oussekine”) and family comedies (“Week-end Family) or romantic (“Irrésistible”), has “never tried to water down “the series,” says Camille de Castelnau.
Including “a very hard episode towards the end, which tells things that I have never seen told,” assures the screenwriter.
“It’s got a good look”, greets AFP Bernard Le Coq, Rose’s grandfather in this production which “necessarily shares certain correspondences” with “Une famille formidable”, of which he played the patriarch for a long time on TF1.
2023-11-14 16:46:21
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