Bad Boys, a moving ode to male friendship

This is the story of Victor, Cyprien and Guillaume, who have known each other since high school and who, every week, meet at the Thousand and One Nights, the local kebab, a timeless place. One day, Victor tells them that he is going to become a father and that he will no longer be able to honor their weekly meeting. Between beers, fries and Tinder dates, Cyprien and Guillaume will now have to move forward alone and reinvent their friendship. Shown in theaters at the start of the year alongside its female double, Pauline enslaved, the short film by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet with Anaïs Demoustier, Les Mauvais Garçons ended its race on Friday evening at the Olympia by winning a deserved César, that of Best short fiction film. “In the short film, there is also a great importance of singularity and the staging because these are films that are often watched in a continuum. It is not the same gesture as going to the cinema”, analyzed Élie Girard, its director, when we interviewed him a few days before the ceremony. Its singularity is to undermine the taboo of a virile male friendship. Faced with the happiness of their friend, Cyprien (Aurélien Gabrielli) and Guillaume (Raphaël Quenard, magnificent loser and rising figure in French cinema, recently seen in Fragile, Les Olympiades and Mandibules) question themselves. Under the dim neon lights of the kebab or in the darkness of the Nancy night, they take stock of their mistakes and take stock of their wanderings. Arte puts 15 short films pre-selected for the Césars online from the filmography of Élie, whom he celebrates and questions in Les Mauvais Garçons, in Platonique, the series he co-wrote with Camille Rosset soon to be broadcast on OCS, and in his future feature film. 30-something sentimental or the gap that develops between old friends in this great turn of life is a chestnut tree among filmmakers – this year, Jacques Audiard also made it the subject of the Olympiades and Joachim Trier of Julie (in 12 chapters ) – they are filmed here with a lot of sincerity and an infinite tenderness towards these complex and awkward boys. “If you are sincere with what you want to say, it always ends up ‘to the spectator. Before, I imagined it as a wish pious but there, I saw this process at work”, noted Elie, clairvoyant. Les Bad Boys, a delicate ode to male friendship, is available in replay on Arte.tv until March 20.