Our review of Black Butterflies on Arte.tv: the writer facing the monster

Our review of Black Butterflies on Arte.tv: the writer facing the monster


CRITICAL - A retiree contacts a writer in search of inspiration to entrust him with his memories of a serial killer. A psychedelic and bloody series carried by Niels Arestrup and Nicolas Duvauchelle

After two remote expeditions to Guyana and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon for the series maroniOlivier Abbou returns to the metropolis with black butterflies, psychedelic and bloody road trip. Consumed by a kidney disease, the pensioner Albert contacts Adrien Mody, writer of a first best-selling novel who has since suffered from blank page syndrome. Albert wants Adrien to write down his memoirs... as a serial killer.

In the France of the 1960s and 1970s, he and his companion hairdresser, Solange, left corpses in their wake without ever being bothered by the police. She was the bait. He was the destroying angel. The power of this appalling romance ignites Adrien's pen. But also pushes him to confront his demons and his own childhood memories.

Niels Arestrup and Nicolas Duvauchelle throw themselves like ogres into these face-to-face encounters à la Hannibal Lecter. Who is telling the truth? Who embellishes it? Who is manipulating whom? “In “telling”, there is also the idea of ​​telling oneself”assumes Olivier Abbou, delighted to fit the stories and chisel his images.

As always with the director, his ability to switch from the rawest reality to an atmosphere of fable amazes. His compositions, where esotericism is just waiting to emerge, evoke Grimm's tales like the Bible, when in a forest garden of Eden Solange and Albert consummate their passion. Each plan is full of symbols, patterns that will take on their importance later. The flashbacks revive the hedonism of the yé-yé years. The nods to Italian gialli abound. Scissors are an accessory and a weapon of choice.

Sensual, disturbing and violent

The director and his co-screenwriter, the novelist Bruno Merle, offer Arte a sensual, disturbing and violent object, something the Franco-German channel is not used to. “Bruno and I have always been fascinated by serial killerstold us Olivier Abbou on the set. The 1990s and 2000s had wrung the genre. But the desire finally came back to us with this love story, this dance between Eros and Thanatos which crosses the generations. » Beyond murderous impulses, the fiction questions, via the figure of Nora, Adrien's scientific companion played by Alice Belaidi, the notion of epigenetics.

Either the transmission of traumas, of family history from father to son, from mother to daughter. Named thus partly in homage to the song of Gainsbourg, The Black Butterflies is a fearsome thriller, but it's also an assumed melody with its wealth of family secrets, hidden connections right up to the policeman (Sami Bouajila), a “cold case” lover who tracks down Albert. We are embarked on this game of (false) leads. The mise en abyme around the writing continues to the end with the publication in bookstores by Éditions du Masque of the novel that Adrien writes during the series. Another way to explore how writing transforms reality.



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