25/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: Wannabe detectives and murderers without a conscience seek each other out in the French director’s film – and predictably, mayhem ensues

(© P Lebruman)

You can almost get away with murder in Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Plastic Guns [+see also:
film review
interview: Jean-Christophe Meurisse
film profile], closing the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes this year. A man kills his family and escapes abroad – for a while, life couldn’t be better. But the people he left behind aren’t so quick to forget, fascinated by the crime and hoping for retribution. When they spot someone who looks just like him, they act quickly. And stupidly.

Cineuropa: Your previous film, Bloody Oranges [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jean-Christophe Meurisse
film profile], had a crude, borderline unpleasant, sense of humour. Is that hard to do these days, also because everyone gets offended?
Jean-Christophe Meurisse: I have been working in theatre for 20 years [with the company Les Chiens de Navarre], and we have developed this specific language combining humour, violence and emotion. It’s only my third feature [also after Apnée [+see also:
trailer
film profile]], but I have done 15 plays, so this kind of humour comes naturally to me at this point.

Thanks to the true-crime boom, amateur investigators have popped up just about everywhere – especially online. You have two of them in the film, and they do their “job” very badly.
It’s getting more and more fashionable. But I wasn’t that interested in fashion: I was also intrigued by how these two women are basically trying to get out of their everyday lives. They are looking for something else, for stronger emotions and excitement, and as a result, they are letting their personal monster out. At first, it’s like a road movie, like Thelma & Louise, but then it goes further and veers into a western. Suddenly, you have several monsters, searching for one another. All of these people are a bit plastic and fake. You have false detectives, a false murderer, a false perfect husband.

You talk about a very uncomfortable fact: families can be exhausting. Having children can be exhausting. It brings to mind Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ruben Östlund
film profile], where a father abandons his family when faced with danger.
I like him a lot, and I like his satirical approach. This situation is different, of course, because my characters are disguising their actual lives and trying to step into different ones – even if it will eventually destroy them. Maybe what I have in common with Östlund is humour.

Or showing our weaknesses. You put one character through torture: he is mistaken for someone else, and others keep going after him. I guess it says something about obsession and people’s inability to let go?
I was thinking about a real-life case here, and that man, also falsely accused, was tortured for 48 hours. Not physically, but he was taken to this horrific prison and was forced to listen to other people’s screams. Just imagine: it’s as if someone were to grab you now, as you are leaving this interview, insist you are public enemy number one and put you through this whirlpool. There is this belief in constant progress, but I wanted to show it’s not exactly like that. We can’t always succeed, because we are only human.

The murderer in the film committed an unimaginable crime: he killed his wife and children. I was wondering if you would come back to his crime or if you would just focus on his life after it.
It was important to show it because we are referencing a very famous person in France. It was important to remind people that he actually killed children. They were so fascinated by the monster, by all these headlines, but this is the truth: he was awful. I was thinking about it a lot when I was developing the story [co-written with Amélie Philippe]: what is this fascination we have with evil? In a way, cinema is made to show evil. Maybe the more of it we see in films, the less of it will happen in real life?