Do Bodin’s symbolize the fracture between Paris and the provinces? Many have said so when, at the end of November, the film Bodin’s in Thailand filled theaters from Brittany to Alsace and as far as New Aquitaine while flopping in the capital.
The comedy, carried by the comic duo embodying an octogenarian farmer, Maria, and her son, Christian, an old bachelor who is also a farmer, was nonetheless a success. Its 1.6 million admissions made it the fifteenth most viewed feature film in French cinemas in 2021. In the annual ranking, it is ahead of major productions such as eiffel (1.5 million), Aline (1.3 million) and even the Marvel Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (1.4 million).
The distributor SND (which belongs to the M6 group) had organized a preview tour for them in 150 cinemas (!) but one can wonder about such an unbalanced Paris/province ratio. In the first week of operation, only 2% of tickets sold were in Ile-de-France. “We don’t really have an explanation. Apart from the fact that it was not played in many rooms in Paris, so that few people saw it and that it was withdrawn fairly quickly from the screens of the capital, ”says Jean-Christian Fraiscinet , aka Christian Bodin on stage. And to follow up with a pirouette: “I think we made a lot of entries outside of Paris because all the Parisians came to see him in the provinces. »
“We do not write for Parisians or for rural people”
We feel that the question amuses his sidekick, Vincent Dubois, alias Maria, less. He believes that this controversy is a “false subject” born from the pen of journalists: “We do not write for Parisians or for rural people. We write for the public. We still insist: do they feel snubbed in the capital? “No, replies Jean-Christian Fraiscinet. We know that we have a Parisian audience. We fill the Zénith, the Folies Bergère, the Olympia…”
On the side of the M6 group, which has supported the Bodin’s for twenty years, socio-geographical considerations are quickly swept away. “We don’t care at all. What we know is that there is an extremely strong attachment of a very very large audience to this family duo, ”says Guillaume Charles, the general manager of programs for the sixth channel. Witness the 4.8 million people who followed, in April 2019, the broadcast of the Bodin’s show. Full-scale live from Nantes. M6 had beaten all its competitors that evening.
She places high hopes in Welcome to the Bodins, a new show shot in December at the Zénith de Nantes and broadcast this Wednesday from 9:10 p.m. We will see the earthy mother-son duo organize an event in their farmhouse to raise funds for the reconstruction of the village church. The building was partly destroyed in a fire inadvertently caused by (spoiler alert) Christian Bodin. A host of guests (Jarry, Elodie Poux, Vincent Niclo, Pascal Obispo, Anne Sila, etc.) have been invited to help them.
“We think our life is really nice”
“We continue to be amazed by what is happening to us. When, in our decor, with our characters, we manage to have fun with people like that, we find that our life is really great, confides Vincent Dubois. We would have lived all these moments twenty years ago, we would surely have made less good use of them. We might have had the impression of having arrived when in this profession, by definition, we never are. »
Humility is constantly in the speeches of the two comedians who, from word to word, want to demonstrate that they literally keep their feet on the ground. The Bodin’s are made in Indre et Loire, have built their notoriety locally without having needed Parisian validation, and they hold on to the peasant common sense of their characters. “We can’t make them say everything because all of a sudden we can betray them. They are pieces of us, but we have to think twice and think, would Maria or Christian say that? “, emphasizes Vincent Dubois. “The Bodin’s are good words, truths that local people tell each other, a simplicity”, summarized this fall, with AFP, their historic producer, Claude Cyndecki.
“We did not go from the party rooms to the Zenith in three weeks”
When they recount their journey, the two artists like to present themselves as “the antithesis of Star Ac’ “. “We drained, through hard work, an audience that grew as we went. We did not go from the village halls to the Zenith in three weeks but in thirty years, ”specifies the interpreter of Maria.
The road to fame was long. The Parisian media were able to show them at best indifference, at worst contempt. “These are two artists who are gifted and who are despised because they represent the province and rurality. But that’s starting to change. With success, well-meaning people are afraid of missing something, ”says their producer.
The first concerned, they do not have the heart for revenge. “We were never revengeful. We have never suffered from this state of affairs. Often, in our jobs, it’s the ego that gives the shit, says Vincent Dubois. What journalists call the hassle is the time it took us to achieve success, but that’s not the real hassle. We have always earned our living with our profession. There were always people in the rooms. It doesn’t matter whether these rooms are in Paris, Nantes, Tours or Clermont, the Bodin’s have not finished decentralizing their humor.