19/06/2024 - The Belgian filmmaker is about to reunite with Rodolphe Burger and Francis Sœtens, the offbeat cops from The Other Laurens, who will be getting a new case

On 26 June, the shoot will begin for Spleen Off, the latest project by prolific filmmaker Claude Schmitz, a sort of escapade for Alain Crab (Rodolphe Burger) and Francis Conrad (Francis Sœtens), the offbeat heroes of his previous film The Other Laurens [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Claude Schmitz
film profile], which we discovered in spring 2023 in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. The Other Laurens followed the adventures of Gabriel Laurens, a rather weary private detective specialised in marital affairs. When his niece Jade irrupts into his life to ask him to investigate the death of her father, Gabriel’s twin brother, he sees memories he thought he’d buried forever resurface. Thus begins an intriguing and hypnotic ride on the traces of this malicious double, which revisits and interrogates the virile cinema culture of the 1990s to think about its faded heroes, and imagine new voices and paths for cinema. On his road at the frontiers of genres, Gabriel Laurens met two rather nonchalant cops, kinds of exterior commentators on the action, pinched with humour in a resolutely dark story.

These two cops, played by Rodolphe Burger and Francis Sœtens, will therefore be the heroes of Spleen Off. Claude Schmitz has imagined new adventures for them, without hesitating to deterritorialise them in order to better exploit their cinematic potential. These two inspectors from the Perpignan judicial police therefore find themselves mutated to Saint-Marie-aux-Mines in Alsace, an uprooting like a promise of thermal and cultural shocks. Freshly disembarked, they start to investigate the theft of a valuable opal, which occurred during the Minéral & Gem salon.

Produced with the light productions help from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, and the Tax Shelter, the film should have a certain kind of spontaneity, or at least an integration of shooting circumstances, which the filmmaker experimented with on his mid-length feature Carwash [+see also:
trailer
film profile] or his feature Lucie Loses Her Horse [+see also:
film review
interview: Claude Schmitz
film profile]. He will work again with Francis Sœtens, his travelling companion on his films as well as his plays, and also bring with him Rodolphe Burger, who made his first steps in front of a camera in that same role of Alain Crab.

Benoît Roland is in charge of production for Wrong Men, thus following Claude Schmitz’s career who he’s been accompanying for several projects. A busy summer for Wrong Men, currently in post-production on the new film by Laurent Micheli, Nino dans la nuit (read the news), but also on the Jean-Benoît Ugeux film L’Âge Mûr (news), and preparing for the shoot in the fall of Kika, Alexe Poukine’s first fiction feature. The outfit will also soon unveil the new films from Guérin Van de Vorst and Sophie Muselle, as well as Valéry Rosier. Spleen Off is co-produced in France by Jérémy Forni for Chevaldeuxtrois, which has also accompanied the filmmaker since his beginnings, with support from the Grand Est Region and the city of Colmar.

(Translated from French)