Alpe d’Huez 2024: José Garcia and Charlotte Gainsbourg make people laugh and cry in Nous, les Leroy

Director Florent Bernard takes José Garcia, Charlotte Gainsbourg and their two children on a sweet and bitter road trip, which takes a funny and melancholy look at ordinary lives.

For those wondering: there’s a lot of laughter this year at Alpe d’Huez. But we laugh sadly, too. Take We, the Leroys: lhe first film by Florent Bernard (herald of Golden Mustache and co-presenter of the Floodcast) brings together Charlotte Gainsbourg, José Garcia, Lyes Salem, Simon Astier and even Luis Rego as guests… A cast that reeked of gaudriole and jokes that fell apart. They are there, but that’s not all. And at the end of the session, amidst the round of applause, we also heard throats being cleared and a few discreet sniffles…

It is paradoxically quite delicate to tell this comedy because we would not want to reveal the sweet or painful surprises that punctuate it. Let’s say, to go quickly, that the film is designed as an odyssey of loss, a long journey into the memories of a couple and into an average France – very average – in search of lost happiness. As the family Land Rover progresses on the roads of Burgundy, this past will fade further…

After being treated to a video intro message from Charlotte Gainsbourg (hilarious when she recounts her comedies – “ give me your hand with Shabbat, Life for real with Dany Boon and Antichrist by Lars Von Trier – well, Von Trier’s film is a comedy, right? “) and another from José Garcia, both excused due to busy schedules, the screening begins. We Leroys opens with a concept prologue taking up the idea of Up there. Florent Bernard tells the story of a couple’s life through the answering machine messages they left for each other over 20 years. The jokes of students in love give way to the concerns of young adults, then to the anxieties of young parents and dissolve into the worn-out routine of the old couple. We pick up Sandrine Leroy (Gainsbourg) at the moment when she decides to separate from her husband. Obviously, Christophe (Garcia) does not accept it so easily, and he takes his wife and two children, Bastien and Lorelei, for a last-chance weekend. Objective: return to the sites of significant events in the family’s history and rekindle the extinguished flame…

Baptiste Lecaplain, Lili Aubry, Florent Bernard, Hadrien Heaulme and Adrien Menielle at the premiere of Nous, les Leroy at the Alpe d’Huez festival.

Nostalgia and Sardou

We quickly realize that Christophe Leroy is not Ulysses. And if his journey to find his wife is a succession of “fights” (against an arrogant cartoonist or a very angry young cassos), they are far from glorious, the film quickly becoming the chronicle of his failure. The places of his past have changed, the places freed from the patina of memory appear gray and dull. In his portrait of a lose France (which Christophe constantly tries to make flamboyant), in his intimate story by turns absurd and pathetic, lyrical and level with the tarmac, the filmmaker finds the fiber of Patrice Leconte of Tandem. And if the provincial road movie doesn’t change Sandrine’s mind, determined to leave home, gradually the family seems to be reborn, relationships are rekindled…

This is the intelligence of the film: the story of this separation does not detail the divorce process, but on the contrary the way in which the father will do everything to reunite the family, his attempt as desperate as it is touching to put the pieces back together. We Leroys sometimes takes on the dimension of an open fault in the edifice of reality, of an overturning of the sensible world. One of the charms of the film lies in its almost nostalgic aspect. Everything seems to be seen through the eyes of the kids and a dealership parking lot suddenly takes on the appearance of a funfair, a street brawl becomes a battle of the titans, and the soundtrack plays Sardou’s classics… Caught in a vice, Bastien and Lorelei are forced to play grown-up, to assume their responsibilities, in the face of Christophe and Sandrine who behave like kids. The cliché-free portrait of the teenagers makes this face-to-face encounter even more successful.

We, the Leroys would be nothing without the slaughter of Gainsbourg and Garcia. She moves and amuses in turn in the role of this very emotional woman while he is fantastic in the role of this father who is too present but very absent. The restaurant scene where he starts singing Sardou is a marvel where crude humor rubs shoulders with total bitterness. Basically, the film asks the question: is this couple so ordinary and so moving so sad? Have they been less successful in life than so many others? With his two actors, Florent Bernard also pays a melancholic homage to bitter-rose Italian cinema – that of Scola, in particular. For a first try, it’s a bit classy.

We, the Leroys, will be released in cinemas on April 24.