Just Anybody (Le Premier venu)

Jacques Doillon

France 2008 | 121 min | 35 mm | colour | 1:1,85 | Pyramide Distribution
French version, Czech subtitles

Civil story of French director Jacques Doillon represents a modern film lesson which shows stylistic clichés of profaned genre of social drama.

The film Just Anybody can be at first perceived as exemplary social drama. The main character Costa is socially inadaptable mugger and drug addict coming back to his native town where he once left his alcoholic father, his wife and three years old child. He is coming from Paris accompanied by his girlfriend Camille who in certain moment in time decided to fall in love with the first man she finds. The very normal behavior of all the characters is amazing; debuting actors are the ones who express themselves in long spontaneous speeches. Elaborate and neat formal structure is being systematically destroyed during the film by reversing the high and the low. The anxiety or tenseness is followed by comicality and even ridiculousness, strong emotion is replaced by vagueness, important dialogue is interrupted by inappropriate diversions. Using modern film expression, Jacques Doillon is stripping down the genre which serves the best to targeted pandering to current (festival) demand.