French drama, 2021.
Title: play on words, symbol of the ambivalence of the main character: Arthur Rimbault was one of the finest poets, and Rambo, one of the most brutal character in cinema.
Laurent Cantet
His film Entre les murs (The Class) won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. His first films were documentaries.
Also:
- 1999: Ressources humaines
- 2001: L'Emploi du temps
- 2017: L'Atelier (The Workshop)
He's not afraid of taking difficult real-life, socio-culturally controversial topics: social issues: unemployment, emigration, ...
The style of Laurent Cantet: neutral. setting up a mirror of modern society, prompts the spectator to take distance, trying to avoid bias and traditional emotional drama.
Story
Inspired by the affaire "Mehdi Meklat". Raise and fall story, ala Barry Lyndon (?)
How to position ourselves in front of something which is unthinkable? Laurent Cantet points a certain hypocrisy: "There was a certain complacency from the circles where Mehdi Meclat was evolving as a writer, people were laughing of the jokes".
Cinema: how to translate the new tech, eg. words, on screen?
Context
Suburbs, integration, divide between social classes, origins, intellectual circles, difficulty to be accepted in different classes/castes...
Set up in French context, but these devises can be universally translated to quite any place in modern/so-called advanced societies.
Question
Questions of the weight of words, the responsibility of the authors (and artists).
A recurring question through the movie: the motivations of Karim D. Desire to be loved, through "likes" on social networks.
Andy Warhol, with his premonitory, famous quote back from the 1968: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."