GAZ DE FRANCE

Sometime after the year 2020, France has a new president, Jean-Yves Gambier, popularly known as Bird, elected thanks to a song, La rigueur en chantant, written specially for him by his advisor, Michel Battemont. Then, the day after the election, Bird’s popularity ratings plummet, and Battemont has to find new ideas to put him back in favour, fast. In the bowels of the Élysée Palace, he assembles a secret focus group based on a variety of atypical French profiles. Philippe Katerine is the president, haunted by visions of parrots and who proclaims his own incompetence; we get a glimpse of a decidedly blue future; we see a world that’s neither quite the same nor entirely different; there is a politician’s speech declaring war on banks… the least we can say about this first feature by Benoît Forgeard (La course nue, Belle-Île-en-Mer), presented at this year’s ACID in Cannes, is that it’s bizarre to the core. But its bizarreness is also utopian and fun, a dream of a world in which imagination could be a real political tool. A film that gives a terribly, terribly human face to the mysterious workings of power.