It is a cry of revolt against racism that Jimmy Laporal-Trésor pushes with The Rascals discovered at the last Deauville Festival. “My film is not just a rant, specifies the filmmaker to 20 minutes. It is above all a popular entertainment as many were doing in the 1980s, the period in which the history of the Rascals. »
The heroes of the film, young and carefree, are swept up in a spiral of violence, after meeting a skinhead who beat them up when they were children. “What I’m telling could happen today but the historical context allowed me to give a stronger film visually”, insists the director. He signs his first feature film after being discovered with the short Black Soldier, cited at the César in 2022.
Rise of the far right in France
The viewer is easily sucked into the lives of these kids facing fear at a time when the extreme right is beginning to rise in France. “When I was a kid, we fled as soon as we saw guys who could have skinhead looks, remembers the 46-year-old filmmaker. We hoped that things would evolve in the right direction when we grew up, and forty years later, we are still faced with the same questions. Paradoxically, the aesthetics of the film, which clearly refers to Underdogs by Francis Ford Coppola accentuates the very topical issue posed by the director.
“Today, far-right ideology is largely uninhibited, insists Jimmy Laporal-Trésor. I would like to The Rascals thought-provoking while providing suspense-packed entertainment. This fast-paced action film achieves this result by shaking its audience without giving them the slightest respite.