2023-06-26 09:49:47
In Thailand, Xavier Gens is reinventing the action film. Blood and tears, a huge technical knockout, unparalleled in French cinema.
“I wanted to make a real, great popular French action film, a nasty, venerable film that doesn’t have to be ashamed of foreign productions. Xavier Gens, 48 years old, has been working on genre cinema for twenty years, action, horror, SF, monsters, gore films… In short, the guy has faith, ideas and especially talent. In 2019, his friend the Welsh director Gareth Evans (The Raid and soon Havoc with Tom Hardy who promises to be apocalyptic) offered him to direct three episodes of his series Gangs of London, an electric mix between The Godfather, Sam Peckinpah and Shakespeare, with the bonus of hectoliters of blood. On the series, People obtains 20 days of shooting per episode, a consequent budget and an instruction: to push the cursors to the limit. Our man does not need to be asked and chisels an icy episode 6 like Funny Games where a woman is tortured for… 40 minutes, or even a carnage with a machete in a sequence shot.
Thanks to Evans, Xavier gens is introduced to the “previz” (previsualization) for action scenes. “Simply, it’s filming with a simple phone what the sequence is going to be and editing it to the nearest image. So we shoot in a set of proportions, with stuntmen and actors, and we shoot the sequence before it is shot. We design the scene entirely and thus we obtain on the set what was thought out, designed, not 100% but 1000%. With Farang, Xavier worked three months in preview before shooting. And what he gets is molten metal, a choreography of chaos, a huge technical knockout.
“A TRUE HERO OF MAGHREBIAN ORIGIN”
On the run in Thailand, Sam left behind his suburbs and his life as a delinquent. He starts a family but accepts an easy hit for a local godfather. Of course, the trick and the caïd takes it out on his family… On this basic revenge movie script, Gens embroiders a series of bewildering fight scenes. Its main actor, the excellent Nassim Lyes, is originally a real kickboxing champion, and he faces his opponents – all Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen stuntmen – in a ring or in an elevator, with his bare hands, with bladed weapons, when he’s not blowing heads with a shotgun. It’s brutal, absolutely enjoyable and the director’s love for the 7th art explodes with each shot.
If People unboxes everything, he does not forget that he is also the delicate producer of Papicha. So there is also a real love story at the heart of the film, and a good job on crossbreeding. “I wanted a real hero of North African origin, but that’s not the subject of the film. When we see Denzel Washington, we don’t wonder regarding his color, it’s not the subject that he is black. This is exactly what I wanted for Farang. It’s important, things have to change. “Ultimate surprise, the great villain of the film is not interpreted by a rapper who rolls mechanics but by… Olivier Gourmet, far from the Dardenne brothers. Suffice to say that the final fight is worth its weight in steak tartare. Highly recommended.
FARANG
XAVIER GENS
THEATER RELEASE JUNE 28
By Marc Godin
1688372049
#Film #month #Farang
