A cycle of French comedies, that will include four fiction films unseen in Cuba is the proposal made by La Rampa movie-theater from April 1st to May 1st.

The program has been organized by the French Embassy in Cuba, the French Alliance, the French Institute and the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry.

A great audience of Cuban enjoy French comedies because of their amazing characters and the amusing stories that feature the French mood.

As Cubacine claims, ¨French comedy is a perfect channel for the display of the European society´s obsessions, from the politics to the most intimate¨.

This features are clearly evidenced in the four films included in the French sample that will be exhibited during April at La Rampa.

Cubacine details that, Playlist (2020) is the cinematographic debut of the French comics ‘creator Nine Antico; punk and feminist author of the Le Goût du Paradis, Coney Island Baby, Girls don´t cry and America comics, with a marked influence of the American pop culture of the 60s and 70s.

Antico´s opera prima bets for a hybrid that transits among the biography and the referential, in order to represent a Sophie person, a young that sees her life passing by between the sentimental and professional deceptions while dreaming on becoming a comics creator and earning a living as a waitress.

Playlist photogram. Taken from Cubacine.

Playlist could be considered the feminine reverse of Alta fidelidad (High fidelity) (2000) since both use the analogy of a music playlist as soundtrack for representing a life, knitting a flashback of failed sentimental relationships lived by the main character.

The film director chooses singer Daniel Johnston as leitmotiv for setting the plot, so during the film folk, melodic pop and indie rock styles will be perceived in order to set the dramaturgy of the story. It´s an independent cinema with a tendency to dialogues that easily pass from the audacity to the conservative, in an entertained proposal that can be seen with pleasure and could get the attention of millennials and not so young people. 

Photogram of Mandibulas. Taken from Cubacine.

Other film of the cycle is Mandíbulas (2020), from the Belgian director Quentin Dupieux who throughout his career has been characterized by making a cinema that plays both with surrealism and the non-sense at the same time.

In the movie, the director advocates for an honest and memorable tale about friendship. In a story with two silly too silly, with a touch of fantasy and a fair dose of irony, both protagonists get the audience into their relationship as if we were one of them so that we laugh with their roles and peculiar sense of the success. The absurd elaboration of the plot never gets obstructed in any sense; sequences are presented in a sort of chapters of a story book: the caravan, the search for food, the wrong girlfriends. A comedy about friends to be enjoyed in a movie evening.

Photogram of Teddy. Taken from Cubacine.

The program suggests two more titles, Teddy (2020) and Al abordaje! (2020). The first one plays with the boundaries of the fiction films and the bloody action to deepen in more serious topics such as the awareness of the identity.

Poster of the film Al abordaje!. Taken from Cubacine.

Al abordaje!, though to the road movies´ style, drives us in a summer trip with a smart and smooth way, showing the daily life of a French youth few times represented from the humorist point of view.