Robin Renucci is a very good French theater and movie actor, playing mainly serious roles. So it came as a surprise to see him display such a sense of comedy in his first effort behind the camera "Sempre Vivu" (Still alive).
Renucci bases his story on a twofold personal experience: first he lives in a small village in the Corsican mountains, second he has launched a drama workshop in this remote place in order to revive it. Very logically indeed the plot is about a man in a remote Corsican village wanting to create an open air theater with a view to making people proud of themselves again while attracting people to this forlorn place.
The surprise is that "Sempre Vivu" has nothing of a documentary. The man who designed the theater project in the film is in no way a handsome Renucci lookalike but a pot-bellied, scheming though amiable old mayor.And the story is not a self-satisfied panegyric of Renucci's wonderful-devotion-to-his-village but a colorful comedy in the Commedia dell'Arte style (after all wasn't Corsica Italian before becoming French?).
The story is funny, told with liveliness. Like in Pagnol movies the characters have the gift of gab and are both annoying and endearing, combining refreshing spontaneity with shameless bad faith. The actors interpreting them are almost all unknown (many are amateurs from the village) but excellent. And their faces being alien to us reinforces the authenticity of the whole thing.
Another good point is the imagination and creativeness displayed by Rennucci and his collaborators. They never shy away from nonsense or surrealism. I particularly enjoyed such finds as the showdown between the two brothers imitation Rambo, imitation western, etc. as well as the old vaudeville version of the song "Ma Tonkinoise".
The icing on the cake is that Renucci manages, for all the farcical tone, to draw a faithful portrait of grass roots Corsica, a region where people are full of life but where life deserts them, where people are as full of energy as they are prone to scheming, where optimism runs alongside insincerity, where backward traditionalism and invigorating humor are at each other's throats. An engaging land full of contradictions Robin Renucci pays homage to with infectious good humor.
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