FANTASIA 2025 • Amélie Ravalec 's Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

FANTASIA

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

In a hundred minutes of blistering archival imagery, haunting testimonies, and mesmerizing audiovisual detours, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, the latest work by French documentarian Amélie Ravalec, lifts the veil on one of the most thrilling, radical, and under-documented art movements of the 20th century. This is not just a film—it is a rapture, a time portal, and a scream of remembrance for the uncontainable creativity that emerged from the scorched soil of postwar Japan.

Amélie Ravalec during the Q&A at Fantasia Fest. A book will follow in September 2025 HERE
Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

Ravalec is no stranger to the subterranean: her earlier works, Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay and Paris/Berlin: 20 Years of Underground Techno, mapped the pulse of Western subcultures. But with Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, she pivots eastward—and upward in ambition—taking on a movement that defies categorization, one born from atomic fire and cultural fracture.

The film’s premise is deceptively straightforward: a chronicle of the 1960s and ’70s Japanese underground arts, focusing on photography, graphic design, and performance. But the execution is kaleidoscopic. Ravalec’s camera dances with ghosts—some literal, some metaphorical—through reels of seldom-seen footage, razor-sharp interviews with survivors, and a torrent of surreal images that electrify the screen. You don’t watch this film. You weather it.

Yukio Mishima's A Life in Four Chapters

The Radiant Wound

Japan in the 1960s was still metabolizing trauma at a cellular level. The nuclear cataclysm of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the humiliations of occupation, and the psychic dislocation of rapid Westernization had created a society of contradictions—repressed yet explosive, ashamed yet unrepentant. Ravalec opens with this historical context, not as backdrop but as root system. Out of these contradictions sprouted a countercultural bloom unlike anything the world had seen: Butoh dance, the grotesque theatre of the Angura troupes, the erotic rawness of underground photography, and the feral brilliance of graphic design that mixed Buddhist iconography with B-29 bombers and American porn stars.

“Fear was in our milk,” says one interviewee, an aging avant-gardist reflecting on growing up in firebombed Tokyo. That fear became fuel. The film presents this movement as not merely artistic but existential—an attempt to exorcise, or at least externalize, a haunted collective psyche.

You will find out more about Yukio Mishima, a complex multidisciplinary artist who committed Seppuku 

A Cast of Unruly Visionaries

The ensemble of voices that Ravalec assembles is staggering. Chief among them is photographer Daido Moriyama, whose grainy, blurry, provocatively “failed” images became synonymous with the are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus) style. His work, Ravalec suggests, is not documentary but divination—a way to see into the “slits” of daily life and glimpse a parallel Japan, warped by trauma and desire.

Equally riveting are segments on Eikoh Hosoe, who famously collaborated with writer and nationalist icon Yukio Mishima in the homoerotic photo series Killed by Roses; and Nobuyoshi Araki, whose bound female subjects—photographed with unsettling tenderness—force a reevaluation of Western assumptions about erotica and shame. “In Japan,” a scholar explains, “the rope is not just bondage. It’s story. It’s ritual. It’s inheritance.”

And then there’s Shūji Terayama, the film’s enigmatic godfather figure. A poet, provocateur, filmmaker, and Pied Piper of the outré, Terayama’s infamous slogans—“Throw away your books and run into the streets!”—are shown to be more than rebellious posturing. In footage from his Tenjo Sajiki troupe, we see human bodies treated as canvases, theatres transformed into psychic battlefields, and scripts that read like riddles from a dream. Ravalec’s decision to intercut Terayama’s autobiographical film Pastoral: To Die in the Country with images from his actual life is particularly effective—it feels as though the artist himself is narrating from beyond the grave.

The Language of Disobedience

What unites these disparate figures is not merely a shared timeline or aesthetic, but a language of defiance. The Japanese avant-garde didn’t just reject Western norms—it rejected Japanese ones too, attacking the rigidity of traditional forms with an almost gleeful violence. Butoh, for instance, emerged not as a dance but an anti-dance—writhing bodies covered in ash, eyes rolled back, channeling both ancient ritual and modern alienation. It’s the opposite of ballet: grotesque, slow, and raw. In Ravalec’s hands, Butoh becomes a metaphor for the entire film—beautiful in its ugliness, transcendent in its descent.

Likewise, the underground theatre movement—Angura—mounted productions in tents, in streets, and on trains. Nudity was common, chaos encouraged. One archival clip shows commuters stunned into silence as guerilla performers stage an impromptu act of ritual suicide in a subway car. “We had no time for museums,” an actor recalls. “The city was our canvas.”

The documentary makes clear that this movement was ephemeral by design. Most of its major figures are now dead. Others, like Carmen Maki or the members of the anarchic free-jazz group Shibusa Shirazu, continue to perform—living relics of a vanished world. But the physical spaces that housed this rebellion—Lady Jane café, the Golden Gai bars, backstreet galleries—are either gone or gentrified into simulacra of themselves. TikTok tourists now flood lanes once stalked by artistic revolutionaries.

A  photo by Nobuyoshi Araki 

The Ghost in the Image

Still, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers refuses nostalgia. This is not a requiem but a reanimation. The film’s relentless visuality—poster art by Tadanori Yokoo, the surreal photobooks of Kikuji Kawada (The Map), Ishiuchi Miyako’s raw documentation of U.S. military bases—is so intense it borders on psychedelic. Ravalec avoids the trap of letting the Western voice dominate; her narration is spare, her tone reverent but never appropriative. She gives space to Japanese voices, particularly women, to contextualize their experience in a way that resists fetish and simplification.

That resistance is perhaps the film’s most admirable quality. Ravalec understands that to see Japanese art through a Western lens is to miss its essence entirely. Instead, she creates a kind of cinematic noh mask—opaque at times, mysterious, but alive with significance. You feel the temperature of the culture shift. You hear the unsaid. You see the ghost in the image.

A Necessary Resurrection

Can such a moment ever happen again? The film doesn’t pretend it can. That particular confluence of trauma, rupture, rebellion, and artistic hunger was unique and unrepeatable. But by resurrecting it with such care, intensity, and vision, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers becomes more than a film—it becomes a warning, a reminder, and, in its best moments, a work of avant-garde art itself.

Whether you’re an artist, a student of history, or simply someone attuned to the seismic shifts of human expression, this is essential viewing. Go to the theater. Sit in the dark. Let it burn into you.

Because as Terayama might say: throw away your streaming algorithm—and run into the fire.

You have time to see the movie at Cinémathèque Québécoise until July 31, 2025 INFOS

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA 2025 • Alberto Sciamma 's CIELO

FANTASIA

CIELO

 

In Cielo, director Alberto Sciamma delivers not just a film but an act of cinematic grace — a testament to the spiritual and emotional capacities of storytelling that rarely arrives in such raw, transcendent form. At once visually sumptuous, narratively unpredictable, and emotionally revelatory, Cielo is a Bolivian-set tale that fuses magical realism with the bruising truths of human suffering and hope, in the tradition of the best South American literature. You don’t watch this movie so much as you are drawn into its spell, as if by celestial gravity.

At the center of this beguiling vision is Santa — not a saint, not yet — a young girl portrayed with astonishing sincerity by newcomer Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda. She lives high in the Bolivian Altiplano, a place of impossible beauty: jagged peaks, glacial lakes like mirrors to the divine, clouds like lost ships sailing across the sky. Santa’s world, however, is anything but heavenly. She’s caught between her gentle, warm mother Paz (Carla Arana) and her brutal, liquor-soaked father (Juan Carlos Aduviri), whose violence simmers beneath every interaction like a stormcloud behind a mountain.

On the left:  John Dunton-Downer: on the right: Alberto Sciamma who were present for the screening and answer questions from the audience. Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

One day, Santa decides she must take her mother to Heaven. Not symbolically. Literally. And so begins a journey through landscapes as strange and sacred as the human heart.

What Cielo offers in narrative is less a plotted arc than a migration of spirit. It shares the bones of a fairy tale — a girl on a quest, a cruel father, miraculous helpers — but it resists the saccharine polish of modern fables. This is magical realism in the oldest, truest sense: the impossible revealed not as escapism, but as a way of telling the emotional truth more clearly than realism alone ever could.

From its first unsettling image — Santa calmly catching and swallowing a live fish — we are alerted that logic will not be our guide through this film. That fish, like so many recurring symbols in Cielo, reappears throughout the journey: sometimes alive, sometimes dead, sometimes regurgitated whole. It becomes talisman, companion, question mark. Santa speaks to it. Others dream of it. It may be a soul, or faith, or a memory — or it may simply be a fish. Cielo never over-explains. It invites belief rather than demands understanding.

Along her journey, Santa encounters figures that feel lifted from dream or parable: a grieving policeman with a tender secret behind his macho mustache (Fernando Arze Echalar), a skeptical priest (Luis Bredow) whose cynicism cracks open when confronted with possibility, and a troupe of female Cholita wrestlers who briefly become her guardians. These characters are not mere color or comic relief; they are transformed by Santa’s conviction, as if her very presence evokes something holy in the brokenness of others. One wonders if she is a prophet, a saint, or merely a child who refuses to stop believing.

Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda greeting us from Bolivia. Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025

Sciamma’s direction here is nothing short of audacious. Cielo dances across genres — part road movie, part fantasy, part spiritual drama, part social critique — yet always anchored by emotional truth. Just when you settle into one rhythm, the film slides into another: a moment of gutting violence follows a vision of grace; surreal comedy bubbles beneath grief. The tonal tightrope Sciamma walks is narrow and high, but he never stumbles.

He’s aided immeasurably by cinematographer Alex Metcalfe, whose lens finds grandeur in both the vast and the intimate. The high Andean terrain is shot with reverence, light catching on ice, shadows painting mountain curves. Yet equally stunning are the scenes of Santa and her mother, framed in tight, glowing compositions that transform simple acts — bathing, cooking, braiding hair — into rituals of love and endurance. Their clothes, in vivid reds and blues against the blue sky, seem almost otherworldly, reminding us that color, too, is language.

The comparison to filmmakers like Jean-Claude Lauzon (Léolo) or André Forcier is apt — there’s a similarly defiant surrealism here, a refusal to bow to realism as the only form of truth. But Cielo feels entirely its own creation, drawing on Bolivian myth, Catholic iconography, and Indigenous cosmology with a light but reverent touch. It understands that belief is not a weakness, but a way through suffering.

That suffering is never sanitized. Like the oldest fairy tales — the ones before Disney got to them — Cielo acknowledges that magic doesn’t erase pain. If anything, it heightens it. Miracles come at a cost. People die. Love fails. But even amid this, wonder persists. A dead condor flies again. A wound closes without explanation. A child keeps walking toward Heaven, fish in hand, faith intact.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about Cielo is how it makes the viewer feel these things not as metaphors, but as experiences. It does not tell you what to think. It gives you images and emotion, and trusts you to meet it halfway. It moves you to tears — and you may not even know why. The effect is cumulative, almost alchemical. You leave the cinema changed, or at least reminded that change is possible.

Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda’s performance deserves special praise. It is rare to see a child actor carry such emotional weight without ever seeming coached or precious. She is not precocious, not “cute,” but elemental — her gaze unflinching, her voice quiet but sure. She believes in Heaven, and by the end, somehow, so do we.

Is there a Heaven in this film? Does Santa arrive? Sciamma withholds easy answers. What matters is the journey, and what is discovered along the way: courage, grace, forgiveness, beauty. Whether or not she finds Heaven, she brings a little of it with her. And that, ultimately, is the miracle of Cielo.

At the Fantasia International Film Festival, where genre often reigns supreme, Cielo feels like a quiet revolution. It doesn’t scream. It whispers, and then, somehow, it sings. For those willing to surrender to its rhythm, its mysteries, its fish and flying birds, its blood and starlight — Cielo offers a cinema of the soul.

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA 2025 • The Well Directed by Hubert Davis

 FANTASIA

“The Well”  Hubert Davis, a Riveting Eco-Thriller Evokes Our Dire Future With Poetic Intensity

In The Well, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Davis brings his deeply attuned documentarian eye to narrative cinema, crafting a dystopian vision as harrowing as it is heartbreakingly real. Departing from the supernatural tropes that populate most post-apocalyptic thrillers, Davis roots his first feature film in a terror far closer to home: environmental collapse. Water, the primordial substance that has birthed and sustained civilizations, becomes a rare currency in this tale of survival and moral erosion.

Set in a dense, sun-streaked forest rendered both sanctuary and prison by cinematographer Catherine Lutes, The Well tells the story of the Devine family. Paul (Arnold Pinnock) and Elisha (Joanne Boland) live in hiding with their daughter Sarah (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon, luminous with resolve and naïveté), guarding their freshwater supply as the world beyond descends into chaos. Their uneasy peace shatters when Jamie (Idrissa Sanogo) stumbles injured into their clearing. Sarah, yearning for connection in her isolation, is drawn to him despite her parents’ fear of contagion and infiltration.

When their well fails, Sarah defies her parents and follows Jamie to his compound, meeting its enigmatic matriarch, Gabriel (the formidable Sheila McCarthy), who dispenses cryptic parables that veil desperate motives. Davis orchestrates these encounters with unflinching precision, revealing every flaw in human character – greed, fear, tribalism – as instinctual responses to scarcity. The forest, dense with shadows and uneasy rustlings, becomes a moral terrain as treacherous as it is beautiful.

Davis’s deftness with tension echoes his documentary mastery in Black Ice, but here he widens his lens to narrative grandeur. Working alongside executive producers Clement Virgo and Damon D’Oliveira, he constructs a world frighteningly proximate to our own, where ecological collapse forces us to re-examine not only our survival skills but the very structures of empathy and community.

“The Well” benefits from genre stalwarts including Noah Lamanna (The Last of Us) and Natasha Mumba (The Handmaid’s Tale), but it is Pierre-Dixon and McCarthy’s scenes together that sear the screen. Their interplay – innocence meeting cunning, hope clashing with pragmatism – distills the film’s unspoken question: in an unravelling world, who deserves salvation?

The film’s score hums with dread while refusing melodrama, and Davis’s script is refreshingly free of sanctimony. His apocalypse is not an excuse for spectacle; it is a warning, an elegy, and an indictment. As Davis has said, The Well is born from his own fears as a father, grappling with the chaos his children will inherit. The film’s final moments – spare, haunting, unresolvable – leave the viewer with a pulsing ache. It demands we ask what we will sacrifice to protect those we love, and whether that very impulse might doom us all.

Combining Afrofuturism with ecological realism, The Well is a rare cinematic achievement: it conjures a terrifying tomorrow to illuminate the moral failures of today. Hubert Davis has not merely arrived as a narrative filmmaker; he has announced himself with a clarion call we can ill afford to ignore.

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA 2025 • Mamoru Oshii 's "Angel's Egg"• August 02 @FantasiaFest

FANTASIA

Angel’s Egg unfolds like a forgotten myth—half-remembered, half-invented, and entirely sacred.

Can you write about a film that defies language, that slips through the cracks of narrative like water seeping into ancient stone? Angel’s Egg, Mamoru Oshii’s cryptic 1985 masterpiece, is less a movie than a whispered dream—one so fragile and deliberate that to speak of it feels like risking its collapse. And yet, talk about it we must, because Angel’s Egg is an experience that demands introspection, invites discomfort, and rewards patience with a kind of revelation that doesn’t explain, but lingers.

At a spare seventy-one minutes, Angel’s Egg stretches time like a psalm spoken underwater. It is unyielding in its refusal to clarify itself. For twenty minutes, silence dominates. There are two characters—a young girl with the hair of an old soul, who guards a large white egg like it contains the last spark of hope in a godless world, and a nameless boy bearing a cross-shaped weapon who may be savior, sinner, or both. Their exchanges are minimal, abstract—almost biblical. They move through a world where Gothic cathedrals collapse into each other and fossilized giants rot beneath the earth, a place where fish shadows swim across walls but the sea is gone. It's a place forsaken by both man and God.

Visually, Angel’s Egg is an abyssal marvel. Yoshitaka Amano’s art direction turns every frame into a cryptic fresco: vast, darkened ruins stretch beyond comprehension, mechanical suns groan in the sky, and time itself seems to be decaying. The imagery evokes Bosch, Giger, and Gothic horror, yet is filtered through a uniquely Japanese sensibility. The animation is slow, reverent—obsessively so—and it dares you to wait, to stare, to meditate.

Is there a plot? Perhaps. A parable is told midway through—about Noah, about a dove that never returns—and it becomes the film’s quiet thesis. Faith in the absence of proof. Hope without reward. Belief in a dying world. The egg becomes both symbol and cipher—childlike faith cradled in trembling hands, something tender and unknowable. Is it worth protecting? Is it even real? Oshii, who began this project in the wake of a personal loss of religious faith, offers no answer.

The final image of Angel’s Egg—its elusive punchline—is a haunting punctuation mark that casts retroactive meaning over all that preceded it. But whether that meaning is despair or transcendence depends entirely on the viewer. Oshii does not comfort. He confronts.

And yet for all its cerebral weight, Angel’s Egg is most powerful as a mood. Its soundscape—minimal, eerie, funereal—melds with the visuals to create an atmosphere that feels thick enough to drown in. It’s less about understanding than surrender. You don’t watch Angel’s Egg; you absorb it. Or perhaps it absorbs you.

It is, undeniably, pretentious. It is also breathtaking.

For fans of games like Bloodborne, which share its obsession with decay, mystery, and the sacred unknowable, Angel’s Egg will feel like a spiritual predecessor. For others, it will be alienating, even infuriating.

But for the right viewer—the willing one—Angel’s Egg is nothing short of a dark prayer carved in celluloid. Whether or not you believe in what it’s praying to, it’s impossible to look away. I belong to this last group.

ありがとう。またすぐに会いましょう

" Arigatō. Mata sugu ni aimashō!"

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA 2025 • Ken’ichirô Akimoto 's "All You Need Is Kill"• August 01 @FantasiaFest

FANTASIA

 All You Need Is Kill — A Visually Stunning, Emotionally Charged Reinvention of a Sci-Fi Classic

Premiering at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, All You Need Is Kill marks a bold new evolution in the life cycle of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s time-loop tale. Previously adapted as a manga and then Hollywood’s Edge of Tomorrow, this fourth iteration—helmed by debut director Ken’ichirô Akimoto and animated by Studio 4°C—leans into the psychological and emotional depth of its characters rather than epic-scale warfare. The result is a visually arresting, narratively intimate sci-fi film that redefines what it means to "live, die, repeat."

Set in a post-COVID world, the film trades military barracks and alien battlefields for a quieter apocalypse: a massive alien plant known as Darol has rooted itself on Earth, disrupting life through electromagnetic surges. But one year later, humanity has largely learned to coexist with it—until a single day changes everything. Rita, a quiet researcher with a haunted past, is killed during a sudden attack, only to wake up and relive the same day again. And again. And again.

What makes this adaptation stand out is its emotional core. Unlike previous versions centered on soldier archetypes, Akimoto’s All You Need Is Kill is a character study wearing a sci-fi exosuit. Rita—once a side character in earlier versions—is now the heart of the story. Her time loop becomes less about mastering combat and more about facing internal grief and loneliness. The loop becomes a metaphor for psychological stagnation, and her evolution is one of the most heartfelt in recent anime cinema.

The film is an aesthetic triumph, with Studio 4°C’s cell-shaded animation style bringing a kaleidoscope of color and energy to even the bleakest moments. POV shots during combat scenes feel lifted from first-person video games, while quiet, recurring moments—like Rita waking up in the cafeteria as screams echo in the background—establish a rhythm of existential dread. The designs of the mechanical suits are particularly unique, evoking a Digimon-esque fluidity and giving the characters an exaggerated yet agile presence on screen.

Action sequences are kinetic and inventive, embracing the “roguelike” nature of the source material. As Rita memorizes enemy movements and sharpens her skills, the film channels the repetition and reward systems of video games—but without losing its narrative soul. When she finally meets Kenji, a fellow looper, their dynamic adds new layers to the narrative, keeping the focus refreshingly tight on individual stakes.

However, the film falters in its third act. The climax arrives too abruptly, undermining the emotional buildup and sidelining Rita at the very moment when her arc should reach its peak. The tonal shift and rushed resolution leave an otherwise meticulously crafted experience feeling truncated.

Still, this misstep doesn’t overshadow what Akimoto achieves in his debut. All You Need Is Kill is a rare blend of cerebral science fiction and heartfelt storytelling. It reimagines a familiar narrative through a lens of healing and personal growth, proving that repetition—when done right—can still yield something beautifully new. 

A haunting, gorgeously animated sci-fi gem that finds humanity in the heart of a time loop.

ありがとう。またすぐに会いましょう

" Arigatō. Mata sugu ni aimashō!"

LENA GHIO   

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FANTASIA 2025 • Yasuhiro Aoki's "ChaO" • July 27 @FantasiaFest

FANTASIA

 A Surreal Splash of Romance and Revolution: ChaO Heralds a Daring New Voice in Anime

ChaO at FANTASIA July 27 at 4:00 PM

It’s rare to witness an animated film that feels both exuberantly fresh and steeped in cultural metaphor. ChaO, the dazzling debut feature from veteran animator Yasuhiro Aoki, is just such a film—a psychedelic fusion of romance, politics, and surrealism set in a cyberpunk Shanghai where humans and merfolk co-exist in uneasy harmony. Premiering in competition at Annecy and making a splash at Fantasia, this riotous, genre-scrambling fantasia announces Aoki as a formidable auteur and extends the legacy of Studio 4ºC’s boundary-pushing tradition.

The narrative structure is deceptively simple: in a future Shanghai pulsating with visual overload—where humans ride elevated trains and merfolk dart through slick underwater tubes—young journalist Juno (Ota Shunsei) chases a story that leads him to Stephen (Oji Suzuka), a former ship designer whose unlikely romance with the mermaid princess ChaO (Anna Yamada) catalyzed a fragile peace between land and sea. This framing device allows the film to travel back to our near-present, recounting the wild series of events that led Stephen, a low-level cog in a corporate machine, to become an unwitting diplomatic bridge—and husband to a fish.

Here, ChaO veers gleefully into absurdist territory. After a near-drowning incident, Stephen wakes up in a hospital bed to find himself being serenaded by an enormous, bright orange fish, who proposes marriage on behalf of her father, Neptunus, king of the merfolk. What might play as farce in other hands becomes, in Aoki’s, a rich tableau of emotional dissonance and slapstick satire. There is grotesquerie and grace in equal measure: ChaO, in her original piscine form, is as destructive as she is endearing, while her alternate guise as a blue-haired siren adds a layer of classical allure.

The film’s visual language is nothing short of hallucinogenic. Every frame teems with detail—Shanghai is rendered as a coral reef of steel and neon, its streets bursting with creatures whose forms defy anatomical logic. Human characters coexist with egg-shaped bosses, tentacled commuters, and sentient signage. Artistic director Hiroshi Takiguchi crafts a metropolis that feels alive in the way few animated cities do, while composer Takatsugu Muramatsu’s score oscillates between sweeping orchestral swells and glitchy electronica, mirroring the film’s tonal range.

Yet beneath its anarchic surface, ChaO is a surprisingly tender exploration of connection across species and the bureaucratic absurdity that can both enable and inhibit love. The relationship between Stephen and ChaO is never simple, and the film wisely avoids flattening their dynamic into cliché. Their intimacy is hard-won, awkward, and profoundly funny—a portrait of diplomacy as a deeply personal act.

There are moments when the chaos threatens to overwhelm, and the storytelling can buckle under the weight of its visual invention. But this, too, feels intentional. Aoki leans into the messiness of myth-making, offering a world not of clean allegories, but one where truth is murky and transformation—romantic, political, and personal—is always strange.

With ChaO, Yasuhiro Aoki doesn’t just retell The Little Mermaid; he detonates it, reassembling its pieces into something gloriously weird and undeniably alive. The result is one of the boldest anime debuts in recent memory—funny, fearless, and utterly unmissable.

ありがとう。またすぐに会いましょう

" Arigatō. Mata sugu ni aimashō!"

LENA GHIO   

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Le Secret de Khéops de Barbara Schulz à l'affiche le 18 juillet

BANDE ANNONCE

 

Une comédie d’aventure aussi érudite que jubilatoire

Pour son premier passage derrière la caméra, la comédienne Barbara Schulz signe avec Le Secret de Khéops une comédie d’aventure pleine de charme, de panache et de fantaisie. À mi-chemin entre Les Aventuriers de l’arche perdue et Les Sept Boules de cristal, ce film familial à la française nous embarque dans une chasse au trésor historique aussi burlesque qu’érudite, portée par un Fabrice Luchini en grande forme.

Dans le rôle de Christian Robinson, archéologue fantasque et exalté, Luchini s’en donne à cœur joie. Flamboyant comme un héros de roman feuilleton, il mène une quête improbable mais fascinante : retrouver le trésor du pharaon Khéops, que Napoléon aurait secrètement ramené d’Égypte et dissimulé dans les profondeurs de Paris. Dès les premières scènes, entre une fouille en Égypte et un indice gravé en français, le ton est donné : l’Histoire devient terrain de jeu, et les archives du Louvre se transforment en labyrinthe à énigmes.

Mais Le Secret de Khéops n’est pas qu’un film de chasse au trésor. Sous la légèreté apparente de son intrigue se cache un récit plus intime, celui d’un père qui tente, un peu tardivement, de retisser les liens avec sa fille Isis (interprétée avec une justesse piquante par Julia Piaton) et de transmettre sa passion à son petit-fils Julien (le jeune Gavril Dartevelle, naturel et attachant). Ce triangle intergénérationnel insuffle une profondeur émotionnelle inattendue à l’aventure, sans jamais alourdir le récit.

Barbara Schulz fait preuve d’une réelle maîtrise de la mise en scène. Le rythme est soutenu, les dialogues pétillent, et les décors parisiens sont habilement exploités, entre les sous-sols secrets de la Bastille, les couloirs feutrés de la Malmaison et les recoins oubliés du Louvre. La réalisatrice n’a rien laissé au hasard : le sérieux de la reconstitution historique (validée par des experts comme David Chanteranne et Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier) se conjugue à une mise en scène enlevée, joyeusement inspirée par la bande dessinée franco-belge, de Tardi à Jacobs en passant par Hergé.

Le film trouve un équilibre rare entre érudition et légèreté. Là où beaucoup de comédies d’aventure sombrent dans le pastiche ou le clin d’œil appuyé, Le Secret de Khéops fait mouche grâce à son ton sincère, sa générosité et l’irrésistible charisme de Luchini, espiègle et solaire, véritable moteur comique et narratif du récit.

En somme, Le Secret de Khéops est une belle réussite : un divertissement familial intelligent, drôle et soigné, qui réconcilie aventure, culture et émotion. Une œuvre pleine d’entrain, précieuse comme un papyrus retrouvé au fond d’un sarcophage, et idéale pour illuminer les salles obscures en cette morosité ambiante.

LENA GHIO   

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