Due to climate change, acid rain from Latin America will fall on Europe and destroy all traces of life there. This is the initial postulate ofAcida disaster film that hits theaters this Wednesday, with Guillaume Canet as a proletarian father and ex-convict who tries to save his daughter from these deadly rains.
Acid was imagined to “scare”, director Just Philippot tells BFMTV, already noted with Cloud, a horror movie about bloodsucking lobsters. “I wanted to create a villain from whom I would be completely powerless, from whom I could not escape and from which I could not protect my children.”
In line with war of words by Steven Spielberg, who stages an alien invasion to better speak of the trauma related to the attacks of September 11, 2001, Acid aims to paint a portrait of a contemporary France, bloodless after several health crises.
“I wanted to address contemporary concerns with contemporary characters,” observes Just Philippot. “It is a cinema that speaks about us today: not only about the ecological crisis, but also about a society that is not going well and that is destabilized by anger, by parents who no longer really know where they are going.”
“Phenomenal images of chaos”
This is the role that Guillaume Canet takes on: a dark and violent antihero whose journey offers no possible redemption, far from Hollywood standards. “I am increasingly interested in playing more complex characters that say things about my doubts, my anxieties, my anger,” confirms the interested party.
“When Guillaume read the script, he discovered that he was a little shy,” Just Philippot recalls. “He wanted us to go further.” “I’m reacting after years in which, because I had a good face and made fairly simple films, people believed that I was someone for whom everything was going well,” says Guillaume Canet.
Beyond the horrible dimension, Acid tells “the story of a father and his daughter, who are forced to grow up quickly to survive a catastrophe with no way out,” says the director: “It is a film about a youth that we must put at the center of today’s issues. It is the portrait of youth that has been highly appreciated during Covid.”
“I wanted to see how we could think about tomorrow while seeing a fragile and endangered contemporary world at the same time,” he analyzes again. “What pisses me off today is seeing these young people who want to destroy everything, cutting poles, throwing down a bus… We live with phenomenal images of chaos.”
Government inaction
“Images of anger” that we find in the 24-hour news and in recent documentaries such as A country that behaves wisely by David Dufresne – and which inspired several apocalyptic scenes ofAcid. “I never wanted to imitate Hollywood cinema, but to find another way,” says Just Philippot.
Furthermore, unlike American disaster films, which tend to be very patriotic, the actions of the French government are never shown in Acid. “We saw it at the beginning of the pandemic,” insists Just Philippot. “It was a lot of nonsense. We invented solutions overnight. It made sense to do it in Acid“.
“I didn’t want to take the viewer for an idiot. He knows very well [ce que fait ou ne fait pas le gouvernement]. It is an off-camera that imagines very well. We experienced it not long ago,” continues the director.
Showing how the government reacts to such a crisis would have taken the public “out of the intimacy of the film,” believes Guillaume Canet. “Showing the government’s action serves to reassure when there is no solution to the problem.” And he added with a laugh: “The government should have acted, but it should have done it sooner!”
Source: BFM TV
