This Wednesday comes out at the cinema Clan, based on the hit play by Éric Fraticelli. The story of broken arms trying to kidnap Sophie Marceau. Problem: they confuse her with a complete stranger.
Clan will it be the surprise success of this beginning of the year? Adapted from a successful play by Éric Fraticelli (more than 100,000 spectators), this comedy has sold out at all its previews since November. The release of the film, this Wednesday, a week after Corsica, should confirm this trend.
“I’m not surprised by the laughter in the room. There was laughter in the same place when we were playing the play! What surprises me, on the other hand, is the enthusiasm around this film. Something is happening that we do not control, that we do not understand”, explains Éric Fraticelli, who already attracted 600,000 spectators last year with Building permit.
Written, directed and starred by Fraticelli, Clan tells the story of a team of broken arms – Fred, Achille, Max and Weasel – who try to abduct Sophie Marceau to recover after a missed blow. Problem: they kidnap a complete stranger who happens to be the new police chief’s wife.
Between “The Pigeon” and “Snatch”
With its valves that fuse every second and its absurd story, Clan wowed the audience: “Building permit was nice, but we have already seen films in this style”, believes Éric Fraticelli. “We meet fewer films like Clan in France. Maybe that’s why there’s a sense of curiosity.”
Built on the model of Welcome to the Ch’tis, Building permit recounted the setbacks of a Parisian who wanted to build a house on the island of beauty. Clan “is a mixture of Italian comedy and English comedy in a French film with a Corsican accent”, laughs Éric Fraticelli.
“Which gives us in the end a rather bizarre cocktail: mix films like Pigeon and Awful, dirty and wicked with Snap and you get the style of Clan!”, analyzes the director.
A universal story
Clan is a universal story, which highlights Corsican humor, the “macagna”, or “tease and not mockery”, specifies Éric Fraticelli. “It’s true that it takes place in Corsica, but the heart of the matter is characters, situations that are a bit boring for them and a lot of jokes. It’s quite a simple recipe.”
The press remains hermetic to the phenomenon for the time being. “I don’t want to make excuses for him, but there are no stars in the film. If there had been Jean Dujardin, Gilles Lellouche, Omar Sy, Dany Boon – the 15 we always talk about – it would have made it easier for them to talk about it.”
Éric Fraticelli nevertheless has a star in the cast of Clan: Sophie Marceau in person. But the director does not want to talk about it. “I do not communicate on the fact that she is in the film, because it would be touting and lying to say that it is a film with Sophie Marceau.”
The star of The party actually appears during a scene where she makes fun of her image. A scene written especially for the film, at the request of Sophie Marceau, to whom Éric Fraticelli had sent the script “out of courtesy”: “She told us that the film had made her die of laughter and that it would have been nice if ‘she has a scene.
“The important thing is that the public likes”
As Building permit, Clan ends with a credits where the cast dances. A way to leave the room “with a good feeling”, underlines Éric Fraticelli: “No one reads the credits except the professionals. It’s useless! Since you need a credits, you might as well make one that’s nice! It’s is festive!”
“The important thing for me is that the public likes it. I am addressing the public, not the media”, still asserts the director who refuses to take himself seriously and prefers to break the somewhat rigid constraints of cinema to delivering a film casually: “I try to fight against blind intellectualism,” he says.
Éric Fraticelli is already preparing his third film, which he will shoot in February, and in Corsica, like the previous ones, entitled Priceless. He will give the answer to Didier Bourdon and Philippe Corti, will be a comedy inspired by a real event, the discovery of a Roman treasure during a sea urchin fishing.
What is his magic recipe for shooting so quickly in a context of overproduction? “Threats,” he said, bursting out laughing. “Sometimes things just happen like that,” he adds more seriously. “I am surrounded by quite dynamic people. My producer, Philippe Godeau, is very fast and works well.” The film will be released in 2024.
