It’s night. It’s dark. Sébastien (played by Félix Moati) runs emaciated, with a bloody face and bare chest. Putting a head in an ambulance, scanning the stretchers, climbing on a garbage can, shouting a name. He’s looking for “Jeff.” Around him, firefighters moving in all directions, flashing lights, bruised bodies on the ground, golden survival blankets, the crowd, moans, outbursts, sobs and others, like him, lonely and emaciated.
Marie (Alix Poisson), timidly advances, with her eyes wide open but empty, or absent, among the unfortunates and the blood, she asks for a mobile phone, she meets a man who desperately calls “Bruno”, she sees two women who miraculously meet and embrace each other. Others still leave the Bataclan, crying and shaking, just wanting to send a message to say that they are safe and sound.
From the first seconds, everything is amazement on the screen. Almost familiar images (we have seen them so many times on television) and horror, vivid, red, indescribable, of course.
documentary style
living peopletotem series or series tribute to the survivors of November 13, available this Monday on france.tv (and on November 3 on France 2), tells the story of seven of the eleven hostages of the Bataclan who waited to die, for two hours and twenty minutes, in a narrow corridor on the first floor of the theater, saved at the last minute by the assault of the BRI (Brigade of Investigation and Intervention). Over the years and trauma, these seven, nicknamed the “potages” – a contraction of “companions” and “hostages” – became friends.
Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, director and co-writer of the eight-episode series, used to focus his camera on the news (we owe him the hit series sambre EITHER Leticia) and won an Oscar for his documentary An ideal culprit In 2002, he collected the testimony of these seven disabled people, their spouses, the police psychologist and also the head of the BRI. He wanted, he said, to “film as close to reality as possible” the later life. The one, gray, confusing, intertwined with nightmares and paranoia, that doesn’t really start again.
Served by an XXL cast (Benjamin Lavernhe, Antoine Reinartz, Megan Northam and, therefore, Alix Poisson and Félix Moati), the series shows, in the style of a documentary, how each of them tried to repair themselves. There are those who look at the images of the attack over and over again, return to the scene of the tragedy, observe the collision of the fragments, walk around the places of the victims, they want to preserve everything from this Black Friday. There are also those who look a little elsewhere, curl up under the duvet, nose on the pillow, dare to meet their BRI saviors or a psychiatrist. Those who go to the doctor, live with a bullet in their body, or those who distance themselves from their partner, become misanthropes, face an unsympathetic demon father, feel guilty for staying there when ninety others have lost their lives.
“The confusion between reality and fiction”
Some have memorized everything about that night, others just want to forget, focus on their work, “this escape,” and move on. But everyone, at least these seven, needed to come together to understand each other, remember each other together and live a little better. and sing be lucky in chorus
Yeah living people It serializes life afterward, it does not avoid shocking images, horror shots, those that we had not wanted to show until then – right? The story thus adds somewhat voyeuristic flashbacks of the hostage taking, filmed in the Bataclan itself, which today arouse the discontent of the president of the Life for Paris victims’ association, Arthur Dénouveaux, denouncing in particular “a confusion on the border between fiction and reality.”
In these scenarios, we see the Eagles of Death Metal fans, shoulder to shoulder, with their heads buried in their knees, terrified, elsewhere, almost dead, barely daring to look at their executioners. They often appear blurry, from the side, from behind, but never completely clear. With or without these sequences, whose imperative necessity we question, this series, because it expresses our collective pains and the way in which everyone tries to reconcile them, remains no less moving.
Source: BFM TV
