Popydog

Recorded at the CND November 2011

« In a car park, a man, a woman and a dog are the diabolic actors of a highly-unlikely and disconcerting saga, of a complex scenario filmed live and direct. Influenced by popular iconography and by the genre cinema, this film is a reworking and reinterpretation of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Nothing to do with filmed theatre; here, the aim is to adapt a fiction to the screen exactly like in the cinema.

But why a car park? Orpheus loves Eurydice. Eurydice dies. Orpheus goes looking for her in Hades and loses her once again. The legend is well-known. Except that here, Orpheus is a successful singer onstage at Bercy, with a musical style somewhere between Dire Straits and Michel Fugain during his Big Bazar period, and he is played by Francis Huster. Who sings. Really. It could have been a good film, but like some sort of curse, pretty much in the same vein as those that hit the shooting of Poltergeist, Apocalypse Now and the actors in Arnold and Willy*, it has turned out to be an implausible film, filled with captivating incongruity which, straight out of the partnership of Jacques Demy, Michel Legrand and Francis Huster, is the result of compromises and deals: a sublime failure”.»

Jonathan Capdevielle, Marlène Saldana

Updating: January 2012