Blurring the lines between documentary, fictional drama and family soap opera, Morgane Dziurla-Petit’s debut feature is a fresh and funny hybrid work, full of dry observational humour and tragicomic melancholy. Excess Will Save Us expands the young French-born, Sweden-based writer-director’s prize-winning 2019 short of the same name, which she recycles in lightly tweaked form here as the opening section of this omnibus seven-chapter edition, currently world premiering in competition at both IFFR and Gothenburg film festivals.
Mostly shot in Morgane Dziurla-Petit’s home village of Villereau, a sleepy French farming community close to the Belgian border, Excess Will Save Us is a rich rustic tapestry featuring a colourful ensemble cast of (mostly) real characters, largely drawn from the director’s own family, alongside a handful of professional actors. Framed against a backdrop of beautifully composed pastoral panoramas, this artful Swedish-made production is sure to grab more festival bookings after Rotterdam, while its glumly comic charm and polished production values should help boost break-out potential to wider audiences.
By blending straight documentary with staged vignettes and auto-fiction elements, Dziurla-Petit is following in the footsteps of directors like Ulrich Seidl, Sarah Polly and Jafar Panahi. But much of Excess Will Save Us feels stylistically and temperamentally closer to the deadpan absurdist of veteran Swedish maestro Roy Andersson, for whom the young French director previously worked.
Whimsical farce is certainly the defining mood of the film’s opening chapter, in which various Villereau residents recall how a minor incident in the village was mistaken for a terrorist attack. The director’s larger-than-life widower father Patrick is an asset here, generously willing to caricature himself on screen for comic effect. But a subplot about a young female cousin (Kim Truong) arranging to meet her French-Moroccan boyfriend (Aïmen Derriachi) hints at darker currents behind the rural idyll, about remote communities where ingrained racism festers and stifled teens desperately crave escape.
Like a Charlie Kaufman meta-comedy. Excess Will Save Us moves into a more self-referential register as it develops. Midway through, the film becomes its own subject when Dziurla-Petit and her father travel to Clermont-Ferrand short film festival to premiere the 14-minute sketch that forms the first chapter of this very feature. The whole village reacts to the news with hilariously overblown euphoria, while Patrick convinces himself he is a superstar in Clermont-Ferrand, and vows to relocate there. For anyone familiar with the low-voltage thrills of short film festivals, there are layers of irony at work in this deliriously exaggerated spoof.
Dziurla-Petit also starts to reveal the artifice of her working methods a little more in the film’s second half, including cut-away footage of herself coaching her father to perform a goofy song-and-dance number at his upcoming second marriage. The wedding party itself is shot much more like a conventional dramatic feature film, complete with slow motion shots, slick camera choreography and a violent confrontation that has clearly been staged. The director does not quite break the “fourth wall” here, but she has her unreliable narrators musing to camera about the debatable authenticity of the events on screen: “It’s neither fiction, nor documentary,” they repeat like a robotic mantra.
Knitted together from dozens of fragmentary mini-dramas, the minimal plot of Excess Will Save Us inevitably rambles a little, taking some loopy detours along the way: a musical marriage proposal, a clownish mayoral election, a mysterious massacre of farmyard chickens. If Dziurla-Petit has a clear message to impart, it never emerges. That said, she concludes the story with several key characters breaking away from the soul-crushing backwater of Villereau. Some of these escapees prove to be symbolic stand-ins for the director, who already fled to Sweden, and for her late mother, whose unexplained early death is woven into the film’s latter stages in a poignant montage of old letters and photos.
This lyrical finale renders questions about the ethics of docu-fiction fakery in Excess Will Save Us largely redundant, since Dziurla-Petit is clearly shooting for psychological truth over literal truth, teasing out deeper emotional subtext below prosaic surface fact. Even if it leaves a few unanswered questions hanging, by accident or design, this artful hybrid feature is an engaging and original debut from a promising young director who is still just in her mid-twenties.
Director, screenwriter: Morgane Dziurla-Petit
Cast: Kim Truong, Patrick Petit, Jean-Benoit Ugeux, Roger Petit, Marie-Christine Carlier, Bernard Petit, Aïmen Derriachi, Morgane Dziurla-Petit
Producer: Fredrik Lange
Cinematography: Filip Lyman
Editing: Patrik Forsell, Carl Javer
Production company: Vilda Bomben Film AB (Sweden)
World sales: Cinephil
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Tiger Competition)
In French
100 minutes
