30/09/2024 - Lenny and Harpo Guit rediscover their taste for provocation while trying their hand at romantic comedy and incorporating their love of outcasts

After inciting much gagging and nervous laughter by way of their cheeky prankster tendencies unveiled in their first feature film discovered in Sundance, Mother Schmuckers [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Harpo and Lenny Guit
film profile], Lenny and Harpo Guit are now set to present their second work, Heads or Fails [+see also:
interview: Lenny and Harpo Guit
film profile], in a premiere at the Namur International French Film Festival. Armande Pigeon (Maria Cavalier Bazan) comes from a family of losers, of the beautiful variety. Living off her wits, she navigates her hostile world as she goes, tackling it with pride but also through games. In fact, Armande plays anything and everything: dice, Monopoly, heads or tails, guessing people’s names... It’s her way of challenging her destiny which is anything but glorious, if not altogether repugnant. And it might just happen that, while playing a game of dice, she takes up the maddest challenge yet: that of finding love. After meeting Ronnie (Axel Perin), Armande has something else to escape or, rather, something else to lose.

Because what’s special about Armande is her propensity to always be on the move, as is artfully demonstrated in one particular sequence where she’s supposed to be posing for a group of visual arts students, but she finds it impossible to keep still. Immobility isn’t in her DNA, so she ends up upping sticks and running away from all of her engagements once again. What Armande is running away from, in the first instance, is the precariousness of her everyday life. The film opens with a question: “What is this mess?”, and it’s this very mess that Armande and her companions are trying to defy. The bodies of the Guits brothers’ actors and actresses are portrayed naturalistically, hiding nothing of their banality, but so is the town, whether through an image whose texture can almost be felt or the sound of street noises interfering with conversations.

Heads or Fails starts with an incredibly close close-up, which turns into a grimace offered up by the heroine, who Maria Cavalier Bazan plays with flair. This first shot is subtly disruptive, because we’re not at all used to seeing bright young things offering themselves up in unflattering positions. That grimace - and the ensuing scenes which show no fear at all of bodily fluids or menstrual blood – helps to turn Armande into a neo-heroine of the film world, and that’s no small thing. The Guit brothers shoot her in the same way they’d shoot a boy. She’s a girl who cries, obviously, but she’s also a girl who stuffs herself with food, a girl who has no problem getting naked, a girl free from the pressures of appearing perfect.

Behind its trashy comedy and childish exterior, Heads or Fails paints the portrait of a lost generation who leave things to chance because they’re unable to count on what society has to offer them. It also sheds a political albeit offbeat light on precariousness and the way women are depicted on screen.

Heads or Fails was produced by Roue Libre Production (Belgium). International sales are entrusted to Best Friend Forever.

(Translated from French)