Backstage (2005)

Director:

Emmanuelle Bercot

Writers:

Emmanuelle Bercot (writer)
Jérôme Tonnerre (writer)

Release Date:

16 November 2005 (France)

Genre:

Drama | Music

Plot:

An adolescent groupie (Isild Le Besco) zeroes in on her Blondie-like idol (Emmanuelle Seigner) after the singer chances to cross her orbit on a publicity tour. Gradually their lives intertwine as, with near-operatic intensity, the film delves into the emotional dependency on both sides of celebrity culture. |

Plot Keywords:

Celebrity | Groupie | Singer | Musician | Mirror

Awards:

2 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Emmanuelle Seigner	...	Lauren Waks
Isild Le Besco	...	Lucie
Noémie Lvovsky	...	Juliette
Valéry Zeitoun	...	Seymour
Samuel Benchetrit	...	Daniel
Édith Le Merdy	...	Marie-Line, la mère de Lucie (as Edith Le Merdy)
Jean-Paul Walle Wa Wana	...	Jean-Claude, le garde du corps
Mar Sodupe	...	Nanou
Lise Lamétrie	...	La femme de chambre
Claude Duneton	...	Le père de Lauren
Joëlle Miquel	...	Une fan
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Aurore Auteuil	...	Pamela
Yousef Baghdary	...	Stéphane
Alain Berlioux	...	L'amant de Lauren
Patrick Blanchais	...	L'ingénieur son studio
Julien Bossé	...	Appearing
Léna Breban	...	L'assistante de Backstage
Benjamin Bur	...	Un fan
Elya Carle	...	Le bébé
Stéphane Chapey	...	Le vigile
Fulvia Collongues
Juste Duvernoy	...	Un fan
Marthe Guerin	...	Une fan
Anne-Lise Heimburger
Sandy Lakdar
Tassadit Mandi	...	La gardienne
Laurent Marimbert	...	Le réalisateur studio
Nicolas Maury	...	Un fan
Morgane Polanski	...	La fan en larmes
Inna Revue	...	La stagiaire
Nemo Schiffman	...	Dylan

Runtime:

USA:112 min | Argentina:115 min | Canada:115 min (Toronto International Film Festival)

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Singapore:R21 | Finland:K-15 | Portugal:M/16 | Germany:12 | Argentina:16

Filming Locations:

Champs Elysées, Paris 8, Paris, France

Company:

Black Forest Films

Movie Connections:

Remade as Backstage (2010)

Soundtrack:

Love Is Blindness

As dead as a stuffed deer

Some friends took me to see this film in Helsinki. I really had no idea what to expect. The evening started, as evenings at the cinema do, with a series of trailers. There came what seemed to be a trailer for a French film featuring an ageing chanteuse (shades of a Gallic Madonna perhaps) performing in front of a young, hysterical audience. I thought that there was a film I would not go and see…

… and then it turned out it wasn't a trailer, but the start of the evening's main entertainment. The first five minutes set a scene, and a plot line appeared to be established. Not a particularly enthralling plot, perhaps, but something which might carry us along.

How wrong we were. The plot got stuck in a Paris hotel suite, and the characterisation wasn't even skin deep. The chanteuse – Lauren, or Sylvia – was a diva with problems. But not interesting problems, or dramatic problems; just time-consuming ones. She had some sort of artistic block. She sent a star-struck fan who had implausibly joined her entourage, Lucie, not to buy drugs, but to buy tampons. She was mobbed by fans, a strange and unconvincing mixture, who mostly looked like thirty-something resting actors told to wear something red and plastic. She had family problems of some sort. It was immensely boring. For all I know it perked up in its last forty minutes. But by then we were already in a nearby restaurant wondering why this film should have been made, let alone marketed, or rated by the critics.

There was one good line, when the diva's agent or boyfriend or whatever said that "she likes to appear wild, but underneath she's as dead as her stuffed deer" - a major feature of the hotel suite, which did indeed give a livelier performance than most of the cast. Let that be the epitaph for this exceptionally disappointing movie.