The themes that cross him – the death of a child and the mourning process – are hardly crazy, and the film, although charming, is difficult to classify. Furthermore, Bicycle! was, on paper, even less “Vendable”, is suitable for its director, Mathias Mlekuz, who made for months “a film without scenario”.
The French director puts himself on it himself, during a long trip by bike across Europe, undertaken in the company of his great friend, the actor Philippe Rebbot.
In tandem (with a third canine thief, the dog Lucky), they follow the traces of Youri, the deceased son of Mathias Mlekuz. The two old friends embarked on a strange adventure intended to lighten their sentence: reproducing together, to Istanbul (and without any physical preparation), the journey traveled by bike, some four years earlier, by the young man who disappeared.
If he starts well in the saddle on the genre “documentary”, the film gives on the way handlebars to the left and right to flirt freely with self -fiction, the road movie (with pedals) and the buddy movie… Even the initiatory quest, as a form of resilience takes place over the story.
The original scenario was summed up in a pitch holding on a half-page: “These are two friends who follow the track and memory of the son of one of them. We’re going to bike from La Rochelle to Istanbul, and we’ll see what’s going on there. ”
The complete document – three pages – included a handful of steps in this future route, identified thanks to the souvenir album that the young Youri had made from the same trip, made in 2018, four years before his suicide. Nothing, in this scenario ersatz, could indicate the light, sometimes almost joyful tone, of the journey that the two fathers of family were going to undertake, nor suggested that the metaphysical questions would rub shoulders with the clown’s noses.
Visually licked, the result has nothing of “artisanal”. However, all the content of the film was created “in situ”, thanks to the sense of improvisation of the two cyclists, who have a long roadmap as actors. Long enough to be able to dispense with a clear cinematographic intention. Leak? Outlet? Balm? We will see on site, they said. The film only found its meaning and structure at the final stage of the assembly, says Mathias Mlekuz.
“There has never been a precise text or direction, never had any choice of decor either. The film was really made by accident. We never said to ourselves “Here, we’ll turn there!”. We were advancing by bike, the camera was running, we stopped [parfois] And paf!, that was there! ” summarizes the director, who signs his second feature film here “fiction”, four years after Cure.
Only
“We worked by always doing only one socket, never two. And we never gave ourselves an imposed subject. It’s not “well, we just have to talk about mourning, or food, or friendship”. We were shooting 6 hours to 7 hours a day, and we took everything, ”by means of two cameras piloted by a microscopic technical team. “I accumulated almost 160 hours of rushes And, from this material, I started to find axes [narratifs] And to identify a film “, helped in this by” an exceptional editor, Céline Cloarec “.
The film was not born from a marketable idea, but of an irrepressible “need to look for a link with [mon fils Youri]just after his death ”.
To follow his traces, “I started by clown. Then I went to Brazil with Joseph, my other son, to make exactly the same trip as Youri had made. These two experiences have linked me to my son. I felt like I was communicating with him ”, in the afterlife.
“Then I became interested in his trip [jusqu’à Istanbul]which had lasted a year, and I proposed to Philippe to redo this trip together. […] We have been friends for twenty years and what binds us is humor, so I knew that I was going to laugh a lot with him, that the trip would not be boring. ”
“It was Philippe who had the idea of making it a film. He said to me “we are not going to get there; if we make this trip, we will slam!” He was not wrong: I am overweight; He smokes and drinks ”too much to be healthy.” Her argument was that in the event of a possible glitch, having a shooting team under the elbow was practical, because she was going to be able to serve as a “broom car”.
“I was easy to convince: if we had been sculptors, we [aurait rendu hommage à mon fils en faisant] sculpture; We would be a novelist, we would make it a novel. We are actors … so let’s go to this idea of tribute “by cinema.
Freedom and lightness
Working in this way, in the most total improvisation was not particularly scary, he says. “It was exciting, to recover from it. And above all, [cela confère au film] This very “fluid” quality. Cinema is a heavy industry, there are many people; As a day of filming is very expensive, you have to prepare everything, secure everything. We worked in the greatest insecurity, without work plan, without “saddle” … But what was good, it is especially that we had no obligation of result. It is absolute freedom! We could freely talk about all subjects, without any taboo, like two friends. ”
Before being convinced to embark on this adventure, Mathias Mlekuz and his acolyte had thought of writing a story together, before summoning the cameras. “I think I would have been unable to” write “the film [et même] If I had proposed a story, I don’t think I would have played in it. ”
Between fiction and truth
The director allowed himself a strange mixture of genres, blurring the border between the documentary and fiction a few times, especially during a scope scene – which starts in the truth of the moment, made of fear and anger, but which ends up being “played” by the two men, lost in the depths of the Romanian countryside, but aware of the dramatic interest of such a sequence.
Conversely, to strengthen a comic effect, Mathias Mlekuz added elements of staging during an Austrian airbnb stage, where the duo is kindly tyrannized by an authoritarian German -speaking lodge armed with an automatic translator.
Balm in the heart
Mathias’s grief has not evaporated thanks to the magic of cinema. Can these kinds of injuries really heal?
“Many people asked me if I was better, after making the film …” He takes a long break. “The film was still very hard, psychically and physically, so no, there was not really any improvement, immediately after. On the other hand, when it was shown for the first time, the reaction of the public, its empathy, its receptivity, brought me a form of comfort or consolation. ”
At the end of each of the projections (nearly 200, he mentions) in which the two actors participated, people rushed on them to share their emotions massively and implacably.
At the beginning, the director was a little terrorized. “I said to myself” my God is a very intimate film that we made above all for us, finally, and not necessarily for the public “”.
Bicycle! will be released in the cinema on August 15, in Quebec.
