Too happy to be true
For his third feature film, after Popular in 2012 and The Translators in 2020, Régis Roinsard adapts the novel Waiting for Bojangles by Olivier Bourdeaut. He chooses the two main roles in his film Waiting for Bojangles, Georges and Camille, to Romain Duris and Virginie Efira. The two actors embody this extravagant man and woman, in love with freedom and gripped by an extraordinary romantic passion.
The story of Waiting for Bojangles takes place between the 50s and 60s and tells of their meeting, then the sudden marriage and the arrival of their son Gary (Solan Machado-Graner), finally their life as a threesome where everything is one big partya daily life where you laugh, have fun and dance, where you don’t open the mail and where there is never any misfortune.
Waiting for Bojangles: what illness does Virginie Efira’s character suffer from?
The specter of mental illness
In Waiting for Bojanglesthe sweet madness that characterizes the lives of Gary, Georges and Camille, however, is hidden a darker situation. If Camille is so imaginative, she constantly escapes from reality through poetic escapes, it is because she has terrible and dark thoughts, the suffering of the past that returns and throws her into deep despair. More than melancholy, Camille actually suffers from it bipolarityand so we move from euphoria to depression more and more often and with increasingly serious consequences.
After a period of psychiatric internment after Camille sets fire to their apartment, Georges, Camille and Gary move to a chateau in the south of France. They are accompanied by the family’s best friend, “Garbage“, a senator played by Grégory Gadebois, and Camille seems to be doing much better. But this newfound happiness will only be short-lived…
To life, to death
One morning, no longer able to bear his condition, Camille ends her life, after swallowing an entire tube of medicine and going for a swim. Despite Georges’ efforts to try to revive her, she does not survive. Georges, Gary and “The Scum” bury him in a small group and put on a large fireworks display in the evening. Despite the laughter, Georges struggles to hold back the tears. The next day, when Gary wakes up, his father is no longer there, only “The Trash” remains…
What happened to Giorgio? In a touching dialogue, Gary asks “The Scum” to tell him if his father is gone, but lying, to do so the less banal and less sad reality. Then he replies:
Your father had something very important to tell your mother. A very urgent matter. You understand ? He left to look for her. Without him, you know, he often does anything.
The emotion is at its peak in this final scene ofWaiting for Bojangles where we understand, between the lines, that Georges most likely killed himself too, unable to exist without Camille, she and the love he had for her were his reason for living. And Georges wouldn’t have abandoned Gary to simply “go away”, so we understand that he is gone permanently.
This tragic end ofWaiting for Bojangles differs from that of the novel. In fact, in Olivier Bourdeaut’s text, Georges kills Camille with his own hands to put an end to her suffering, before committing suicide. A harder ending, more ambiguous about the nature of the characters and the reality of this story, which was therefore slightly modified in the film to be a little softer… but no less sad.
Source: Cine Serie
Ray Ortiz is a journalist at Gossipify, known for his coverage of trending news and current events. He is committed to providing readers with accurate and unbiased reporting, and is respected for his ability to keep readers informed on the latest news and issues.
