When it was released in 2022, this French film failed to exceed 40,000 cinema admissions. Still, it’s one of the best films of the year and it’s available to stream.
The Rascalsdirected by Jimmy Laporal-Trésor and released in theaters in 2022, did not meet with the expected success. After eleven weeks of release, this French film barely exceeded 37,000 admissions. And yet, it is one of the best of last year and it is available on MyCanal. The story takes place in the Paris suburbs in 1984 and follows a group of young people who call themselves “The Rascals”. They like to party and flirt while going to Paris. But while this group of friends is enjoying their youth, the arrival of the boneheads, who form a far-right movement steeped in neo-Nazi ideology, will turn everything upside down. Faced with their violence, it will be the start of a war between the Rascals and the boneheads.
The Rascals : a popular film with a strong message
For the making of his first feature film, the director wanted it to be both popular, but also have a political message to convey. “Today they might seem like political films but at the time they were made as popular films. What interested these directors was, above all other ambitions, the relationship with the spectator. I think of filmmakers like Costa-Gavras, who always wanted to create a great spectacle without failing to infuse it with a vision of the world. We classify them as a very intellectual cinema, a cinema of ideas, but the spectator experience was crucial for them.confided Jimmy Laporal-Trésor.
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The Rascals : a meticulous casting
For the casting of his film, the filmmaker absolutely wanted actors who had the same language as at the time. “From the moment of casting, I paid attention to it and I sometimes excluded actors who were very good but had an accent that was too modern and probably very difficult to erase, even while working on it”, he said. To make things even more realistic, he made his actors listen to numerous archives from the 80s before they followed a three-week course with a coach.
Article written with the collaboration of 6Medias.
