Abandoned Paris: Was the final scene of a tough year filmed during COVID?

Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s eighth feature film, A Difficult Year, is in theaters.

Directed by Pio Marmai, Jonathan Cohen, Noemi Merlanti and Mathieu Amalric, the film follows Albert and Bruno, two deeply indebted forty-year-olds who cross paths with young environmental activists. More attracted by the free beer and chips than by their arguments, they gradually join the movement without conviction.

The directors came up with the idea of ​​this film while in prison. During a question-and-answer session organized after the screening of the film at Club AlloCiné, they explained:

“The idea for this film came about during the COVID pandemic, which left us all on pause with the world and wondering where we were. After the world, many people talked about how we would be different if we were. Consume differently to travel differently…

Then there were no people

But in the end there were no more people. The idea was to take a photo of that time, of these two clashing worldviews. The film was drawn like this, in two blocks, in a shot – opposite shot, in two movements, like a waltz.”

Eric Toledano told us about this during our meeting: “There’s the idea of ​​a loop and a waltz, a waltz of ideas, we go from one idea to another. There’s also a lot of bridges with Madeleine’s character, a bridge between generations, between two paths. See Existence and Between 2 Worlds.”

The image of Waltz remained until the end of the film.

Warning, the rest of this article contains spoilers about the end of “A Difficult Year.”

During the last sequence, the cactus (Noemi Merlant) comes out of the coma and Albert (Pio Marmai) will take him for a walk in Paris and dance on the Pont Louis Philippe to the song of Jacques Brel “The Waltz of a Thousand Beats.”“In depopulated Paris. The scene, which was supposed to take place during the Covid pandemic, therefore does not shock the audience.

A film made after the pandemic

However, the feature film was shot after the pandemic. Therefore, filming this series was a real challenge for the team. Eric Toledano explains to us how the team captured the end of a difficult year:

“4 days we shot very early in the morning. We were lucky to have the same weather. Pio and Noem danced on the Louis Philippe Bridge. That’s why we blocked the streets and we had 1 hour to shoot, then we had to let everything go.“

So this scene was shot 4 times an hour, requiring the two actors to be very precise and do everything they could for the script to avoid false connections (even if it meant ending up on our national Michelle and Michelle Show).

The most observant viewers will notice the filmmakers’ hype for their series Arte En Thérapie, as we can see a poster for the series on the panel.

A difficult year It is currently showing in cinemas.