(MENAFN- Arab Times) 
The Specials
Cassel gives a zealous, live-wire performance
Making
a dramatic feature about people who are autistic presents a steep challenge.
How do you get an audience to connect with individuals whose defining trait is
their inability to connect? 'Rain Man', a popular entertainment that I take
utterly seriously, was structured almost entirely around the dramatic conundrum
posed by that question. Dustin Hoffman's Raymond was locked inside his head of
numbers, his spasms of anxiety, the reflexive aphorisms ('I'm an excellent
driver') that defined his existence. The film never violated the self-contained
unit that Raymond was. Yet it told the story of how he was, in the end, able to
connect (sort of) without literally connecting. There was a beautiful conviction
to that.
But in a context that isn't so
Hollywood, a movie that tries to deal honestly with far-end-of-the-spectrum
autism faces a trap. If you make the characters 'relatable', you're probably
soft-pedaling the issue. But if you keep them pure in their detachment, then
you risk walling them off from the audience.
'The
Specials', the social-issue drama that closed the 2019 Cannes Film Festival,
dramatizes a true story based on the figure of Stephane Benhamou, who for years
in Paris has run a shelter for autistic teens and young adults with symptoms
severe enough that even hospitals slink away from caring for them. Stephane,
called Bruno here, is played by Vincent Cassel, in a scraggly dust-gray beard
that makes him look older than we're used to seeing him. There's nothing old
about his energy, though. Cassel gives a zealous, live-wire performance as a
man who exists to serve the people that most caretakers don't want to be
bothered with.
When we first meet Bruno, he's
wearing a New York Yankees cap. After about 15 minutes, he takes it off — and
reveals, to our surprise, that he's got a yarmulke on underneath. It turns out
to be far from incidental that Bruno is an Orthodox Jew. We never hear him
discuss religion (and his partner, as we learn, is a Muslim), but his identity
is that of a compulsive outsider, one driven to create a safety net for the
needy that's removed from the system.
Bruno's home for the autistic is
called Voice of the Righteous, and it houses about 40 patients, but he's always
trying to cram more of them in — and more staff, too, even though he doesn't
have the funds for it. 'We'll find a solution' is his terse mantra, and it has
kept his organization going for 15 years without certification. But Bruno is
scraping by on willpower, and now the state bureaucracy wants to shut him down.
This
sounds like powerful stuff, and 'The Specials' is grounded in a vibe of
commitment. It was written and directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano,
the team who, in 2011, made the controversial 'Intouchables' (a buddy comedy
built around a quadriplegic), and the filmmakers are, in fact, friends with
Stephane Benhamou. The movie features a sprinkling of autistic actors, and
several of those connected with the project — notably Toledano — have a link to
the material through autistic members of their own families.
Compelling
Yet 'The Specials,' in the end,
is not a very compelling movie. It's arduous and rambling and repetitive; it
skitters across the surface of the story it's telling. The film lacks a vibrant
structure, but more than that, it never brings us close to the people it shows
us. Despite the clear devotion of the filmmakers, the autistic figures in the
film are viewed from a nagging distance — most of them are scarcely developed
as characters, even on their own troubled terms. The movie opens with a girl
named Emilie dashing through the streets, screaming and knocking people over,
as if she were some delinquent banshee crying out for help (and as if the
Dardenne brothers were trying to make an action film). The camera stays glued
to her, begging for our investment. Yet once this showpiece sequence is over,
the film loses all interest in Emilie, even when she pops up in Bruno's
shelter. I felt like she was being morally abandoned.
A
couple of the autistic characters are given a healthy amount of screen time,
but that only makes it more frustrating that they remain one-note figures.
Joseph, played by Benjamin Lesieur, is a functional obsessive whose anxieties
cause him to compulsively set off the alarm whenever he's riding the Metro. He
also has a problematic relationship with his mother, who he keeps threatening
to hit, but the filmmakers, in treating this as borderline comedy, fail to give
Joseph any layers. Lesieur, who looks like a fusion of Gerard Depardieu and
Mason Reese, has a compelling presence, but Joseph, even as we get to 'know'
him, remains the same nattering superficial joker-doofus in every scene.
The same sort of thing is true,
only more so, with Valentin (Marco Locatelli), the most violent and tormented
of the characters. He's a preteen strapped into protective headgear to keep him
from banging his head against the wall, and that armor is disturbing to behold;
he's like the character in the self-help cult of Todd Haynes' 'Safe' who never
removed his masked body suit. It feels daring to put a character like this one
on screen, but though there are vivid scenes where we see how hard Valentin is
to manage, the film never gives us a sense of who he is when he's not in the
grip of a tantrum. I'm not suggesting that such a thing could have been
communicated verbally. But Nakache and Toledano work in such an 'objective' way
that their camera scarcely probes what's in front of it.
That includes the lives of the
caretakers. Bruno is partners with Malik (Reda Kateb), who runs his own
organization for non-autistic children from deprived backgrounds (he's based on
the real-life figure of Daoud Tatou), and these two are at the center of the
movie's drama. The trouble is, 'The Specials' doesn't have much drama. Who is
Bruno? He's a loner who goes on occasional blind dates (where he says inept
things such as 'I like divorcees'), and despite Cassel's committed presence, he
remains a bit obtuse as a character. 'The Specials' is built around the
face-off between Bruno and the inspectors (Frederic Pierrot and Suliane Brahim)
who are investigating his organization for the state agency IGAS. This should
have been a conflict that built and fused and exploded. Instead, it's simply
presented. Should Bruno's organization be allowed to exist? Of course; he's
taking in the people no one else wants. But as valiant a mission as that is,
'The Specials' feels like an editorial posing as a movie. (RTRS)
By Owen Gleiberman
MENAFN2406201900960000ID1098676690
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