Can we live without love? This is the question that screenwriter, director and actor Frédéric Hazan (former author for The Guignols who notably distinguished himself by writing the feature films Bis And Strong and the series Mike) when he created the romantic drama Need love, broadcast this Thursday at 9 p.m. on OCS Max. In this series in six episodes, Frédéric Hazan slips into the skin of Marco Delgado, a porn actor on the decline, who works as a bouncer in a nightclub to make ends meet. But for some time, Marco has been taken with strange illnesses, he collapses for a yes or for a no and falls inanimate, as if struck down. After studying his brain, he is diagnosed with a very strange illness: Marco suffers from a lack of love. If he doesn’t find love, one day he might fall apart and never get up again. The starting point of a quest as burlesque as it is tender and under its false absurd airs, full of meaning.
At the center of the plot, Marco Delgado, Marc Guttman of his real name, a well-hung porn actor who hasn’t been filming much for a long time. His modest, needy career is coming to an end. “I really wanted to talk about a comeback porn actor who doesn’t work much anymore and doesn’t really understand this new world of porn anymore. I was interested in seeing someone picking it up, trying to work, but no longer really wanted to,” explains Frédéric Hazan that 20 minutes met at Series Mania.
The difficult reintegration of porn stars
Marco Delgado is overwhelmed, as is his agent (Gérard Jugnot): “They experienced a world of porn where films had scripts, which were worth what they were worth, but there was a desire to do something cinematic. Marco was in a family thing with always the same directors and the same actresses”, develops the creator of Need love.
Moreover, Marco shares his life with his roommate, Laura (Laëtitia Vercken), also a former porn actress, who tries to live from a real passion, painting. Implicitly, Frédéric Hazan depicts the stigma and the difficult retraining of former porn stars. “When he wants to become an actor and we discover his career as a porn actor, it goes extremely badly. For Laura, it’s different, because she has a real passion, a real thing that holds her, she paints, she’s a real artist. Marco is floating, he has nothing to hold on to,” comments Frédéric Hazan.
At night, to make ends meet and drown his melancholy in alcohol, he works in a nightclub where Tom (Maxence Danet-Fauvel, seen in particular in France), his young server colleague who often covers for him with the boss of the place. “Tom is the good pal who gives that distressed co-worker glasses when he’s in trouble with his boss. Little by little, Tom will take up space and interfere in Marco’s life,” explains Maxence Danet-Fauvel.
In addition to drinking more than necessary, Marc begins to have health problems: he is violently ill… The diagnosis is made: he needs love otherwise he will die. “I spoke about it with a neurologist friend, who told me that if a brain, totally deprived of love, no longer secreted anything… We could collapse, perhaps not die from it, but no longer have any love. energy, strength and falling like Marco does. It is plausible”, relates Frédéric Hazan.
The portrait of an increasingly individualistic society
The beginning of “a slightly supernatural fable” and of a quest as irresistibly funny as it is touching, which tells the subtext of our more individualistic society where everyone withdraws behind their screen. “After confinement, we no longer knew if we could shake hands, but we need to touch each other, to feel each other and that’s what Marco missed. He had sex in his job, but he missed tenderness, ”comments the creator of the series.
Marco will start looking for love, first of all with his adoptive mother, Mireille Guttman (Clémentine Célarié), an indescribable child psychiatrist with a hard tooth, who has never taken care of him. “Marco often tries to put his mother out, to hug her. She doesn’t want to because she has a fairly obvious relationship problem, ”laughs Frederic Hazan. “This role amused me and excited me monstrously. I loved. I’ve been waiting for a Frédéric Hazan for a long time,” says Clémentine Célarié.
“Marco still has a form of courage, resilience… Especially vis-à-vis his mother, who is very hard on him. He doesn’t blame her, he forgives her. He has a fairly benevolent background. He’s a pretty good guy, but he’s kind of a wild child who isn’t finished, ”says the series creator. Her path will also cross that of Lila (Anouk Villemin). “The relationship between them is changing a lot and is very complex: sometimes he plays his father, sometimes she plays his mother, sometimes his friend. It mixes a lot of feelings and types of relationships, ”comments the actress.
Will he find some semblance of love with his distant mother, with the mythomaniac and compulsive Lila or was he right in front of him with Laura? A multitude of characters, ultimately not much better off than Marco. “He has lots of people around him. At the beginning, I wanted to put “Need for love” in the plural. They are all together, but do not know how to tell each other that they love each other, out of modesty or clumsiness, ”concludes Frédéric Hazan. Because if this bittersweet comedy touches the heart, it is because it incidentally describes, in a falsely chaotic atmosphere, the mechanics of our modern solitudes.