Between Benoît Poelvoorde and the filmmaker Olivier Babinet who directed him in normal, the agreement was total but not immediate. “I didn’t always understand what he wanted, but he clearly wanted it and I came to understand that not only did he know what he wanted but he was right and it was me who had tastes of the old,” confided the actor to 20 minutes.
The director of fish sex spoiled the actor by offering him a moving role of a dad suffering from a serious illness that his teenage daughter (sublime Justine Lacroix, discovered in That’s love by Claire Burger) tries to maintain a semblance of ordinary life while a visit from a social worker threatens their precarious balance. She holds it at arm’s length by finding a refuge in the universe she invents.
Between realism and fantasy
“Benoît let himself be carried away by the role of this father in which he gave free rein to his sensitivity, says Olivier Babinet. He is a very attentive actor who likes to feel directed, once he has given you his trust. Although he usually can’t stand seeing himself on screen, Benoît Poelvoorde enjoyed discovering normal in projection.
“Maybe because I’m not the main character, but also because I was curious to know what Olivier had done and if he lived up to his script and I wasn’t disappointed. Neither does the spectator who lets himself be caught in the nets of a filmmaker mixing realism and fantasy to offer a magnificent cinema proposal that we accept with emotion.