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Effacer l'Historique
Delete History
France 2020
produced by Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern, Sylvie Pialat, Benoît Quainon, Andreas Habermeyer (executive) for Les Films du Worso, No Money Productions, France 3, Scope Pictures, Pictanovo, Canal+, France Télévisions
directed by Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern
starring Blanche Gardin, Denis Podalydès, Corinne Masiero, Vincent Lacoste, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jackie Berroyer (voice), Jean-Louis Barcelona, Lucas Mondher, Miss Ming, Monique Leroux, Jo Dahan, Suzy, Vincent Dedienne, Victor Kervern, Pierre Gommé, Jessie Bruneau, Ghayaz Shaik, Marguerite Ducroquet, Yona Kervern, Philippe Rebbot, Johanna Classe, Bouli Lanners, Michel Houellebecq, Fabrice Ville, François Nowakoswki, Christophe St-Lambert, Laurent Dray, Avant Strangel, Denis O'Hare, Martine Habermeyer (voice), Vikwet Waskey Sab, Gustave Kervern, Charly Pelletier, Damien Vanuxem, Didier Plomb, Stéphanie Alexandre, David Hattery, Lionel Dufrenne
written by Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Like pretty much everyone else's, Marie (Blanche Gardin), Bertrand
(Denis Podalydès) and Christine's (Corinne Masiero) lives have become
increasingly dependent of cellphones and the internet. But for the three
of them, it has become the root of their problems: Marie, a divorced and
unemployed mother - her son (Lucas Mondher) lives with her ex - slowly
sells of her stuff just over the web to get by, but then she has drunk sex
with a guy (Vincent Lacoste), who has gotten it on tape and now takes to
blackmailing her, even though she has no money. Christine drives for a
rideshare company, but gets really bad ratings from all her customers -
which she doesn't for one minute believes is due to her rude attitude, and
she suspects a conspiracy. Bertrand is in deep debt because he has
bought tons of shit online he'll never been able to pay for. Also his
daughter is mobbed by a couple of girls at her school who have posted a
demeaning video of her on social media. On the other hand, he more and
more falls for a tele-marketer from Mauritius,Miranda (Martine
Habermeyer), who calls him at all hours. Between the three of them they
decide to rebel against the system, first with the help of a mysterious
mobber called God (Bouli Lanners), and when that doesn't help, Marie and
Bertrand decide to go to California and Ireland respectively themselves to
delete the content bothering them from the "cloud" itself. Thing
is, they have no idea how to do that, and when Marie arrives in
California, she fails to get even close to the storage center she thinks
contains her sex tape, and ultimately lands in bed with another man ...
with a camera. Bertrand on the other hand decides last minute to go to
Mauritius rather than Ireland to finally meet Miranda - who isn't all he
has thought her to be ... Effacer L'Historique is a very
poignant satire of modern - as in interconnected - life as such, basically
because it doesn't try to blow things out of proportion in its set-up but
bases its story on carefully built up everypeople with a tendency of
failing who are offered more personality than just being catalysts of the
satire (also helped by a strong ensemble of course), and whose adventures
are cleverly balanced between the comical and the tragical, to a point
where it actually becomes believable when the story takes a turn towards
the absurd. That all said as a feature film, the thing feels a bit too
long, with the story meandering a bit too much, and frankly, despite being
very entertaining as it is, the film would probably have worked better as
a four-parter - even the narrative's build up that brings in major
plottwists relatively late in the game, suggests a serialized structure.
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