Les gros patinent bien

• Duration: 1:25
• France
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Company Le Fils du grand réseau

An imposing Shakespearian thesp (speaking a form of English that not even the good townsfolk of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 would be able to comprehend) recounts the incredible, epic journey across Europe and through the ages of a man – perhaps his ancestor – who, on the banks of a fjord somewhere in the Faroe Islands, sometime in the distant past, was cursed by a mermaid that he accidentally hooked on his fishing line, hauling her from the frozen salty waters beneath the misleadingly auspicious glow of a magnificent aurora borealis, witnessed by a late-season flight of cranes wending their way down to Africa.

That, in a nutshell, is where the story begins. Our hero must then wander across land and sea, from one odyssey to the next. Perhaps he will end up a king, more likely a beggar, and almost definitely broken on a wheel in some savage land, or else condemned to make sweets in a country where the weather is always too warm. Or perhaps a gentle but disappointing death awaits him, upon returning to the family homestead one fine spring evening, welcomed by swarms of horseflies and his sturdy old mother, his life somehow suddenly behind him and still no wiser as to what it all means.

The actor, an undeniably imposing presence, is accompanied in these adventures by a sort of factotum-cum-stagehand-cum-supporting actor, whose abilities are slightly more questionable. As weedy as his master is prodigious, dressed in rags and forced to spend the whole hour scrambling after sloppily-painted cardboard backdrops, not to mention the mountains of more-or-less oddly-shaped cardboard boxes, this faithful servant bends over backwards in his attempts to convey the meaning of this journey. Some might call it an initiatory quest, albeit one whose symbolism has faded into the mists of time, making this endless wandering all over the globe look very much like a wasted journey, a futile quest for the happiness which has always seemed to be hopelessly out of reach for the puffed-up protagonist.

The video is available on the website's french version.