A few weeks before the presidential election, the Belgian artist wins the day with his political-fiction farce.
The special “Presidential 2022” shooting range is open. On site, the noble family of the public theater has planned to unpack, as always, the great texts of the repertoire to show how much Shakespeare was already alerting us to the rise of Zemmour. A little further on, the perpetual “snipers” of political humor Stéphane Guillonesques or Christophe Alevêcoides are already installed there, on your Morris columns, with their “vitriol” stand-ups all aiming in the same direction, with all the same gleaming automatic machine guns. So we were going to play the same game once more.
“Smiley Chick”
And suddenly, the outsider Antoine Defoort (Germinal, A low degree of originality…) has arrived to roll the dice once more, with his water pistol and rubber ducky aesthetic, his Bastien Vivès or Fabcaro noodle shops, his look as a web design student fan of Rabbids, his love of meta-clever theater and lol-distancing, his deliberately bogus sketches, but also a solid theoretical background in the sciences of language and infocom which allows him to create today They live, the only big political show you’ll be begging to see right now.
We are here in the future and the future is very funny to deal with in the theater if one likes, like Antoine Defoort, obviously rotten “low-tech” special effects. In this future, we remember, with homemade holograms, the ideals carried during the last elections by a small party that has become big. So here is the story of the hopes and the renunciations of the young political think tank PCM (Context and Modalities Platform) which intended to reinvent the modalities of democratic debate and ensure that finally, people “listen to each other”. They live therefore never speaks of the content, but of the context of enunciation and reception of the message. In the meeting room, we brainstorm: should we go through the creation of signs “smiley chick” to brandish on TV sets facing the opponent, to certify that we are ready to “to take care” and to “collect” his word ? To believe not, since the PCM, traumatized by the violence of the media game, will finally lose the elections and will be transformed three years later into a school of paradoxical magic.
Bullshit Newspeak
Were they, and are they still, “ridiculous” with their “caregiver” as the infamous Erwan Dubreucq, their political adversary, asserted? We will never really know. And it’s precisely this indecision regarding the target that gives the political-fiction farce such a beautiful melancholy. The last time a comedy writer seized with as much acuity as them of the bullshit newspeak of personal development – this world full of rituals of care where one welcomes the word –, it was Blanche Gardin in his series the best version of myself. It was unambiguous satire, with a clear target – what she holds to be the hypocrisy of “woke” militancy – mocked with overhang. On the contrary, They live is the comedy of assumed ambivalence, where the derision of sylvotherapy and the secret hope that it will show us the way out exist simultaneously. We laugh a lot here regarding the sessions of deep-mindfulness in the forest of Fontainebleau, but without ever being quite sure that the remedy that can finally save us from the mess lies precisely here. That is to say if we are all lost.
