Tonight and the People
Neil Beloufa
2013 - 80 min - Vidéo HD - Couleur - France, États-Unis

“In an imaginary Los Angeles, a bunch of cow-boys, a group of activists, three hippies, four teenagers and a few gangsters are waiting for a major event that is supposed to happen tonight. Meanwhile, they talk about their values, dreams, ideal lovers, and about how politics affect their lives.” Such is the synopsis of Neil Beloufa’s first feature film, the lengthy and logical follow-up to several short films, including the beautiful Kampinski (2007). But it should be added that this heterogeneous and unbelievable reunion is caught in a rigorously ordered net. With sitcom-like flat lights, deliberately artificial settings, recorded depthless voices uttering edited dialogues from previous interviews, stereotyped cast and mechanical acting, nothing strays out of line, life has deserted the place, leaving physical shells to their fate as puppets. Although the project lies somewhere between a sociological survey (it crudely reports the emptiness of truisms actually recorded) and a study of imaginary representations (it piles up clichés of social positions dictated by and reproduced on TV), the outcome of this detailed work is something altogether different. Realism turns into fancy. Because the apocalypse all the characters are waiting for has already happened, and we are actually in Hell.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm, FIDMarseille 2013)