"It was Dostoyevsky who gave me the idea." It’s a drab, provincial and urban version of France, where three lost souls dream of freedom and band together to withstand their anything-but-"normal" hard-knock lives, that Maxime Roy homes in on in his second feature film, Rain Dogs, which was unveiled in a world premiere, competing in the 13th Saint-Jean-de-Luz International Film Festival. This new opus sees the French filmmaker continuing to plough the gritty furrow of marginality, which he first turned his hand to with The Heroics (acclaimed in an Official Selection Special Screening in Cannes 2021), though this time he softens proceedings with a comedic tone and a genre-film plot.

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"Is it hostage-taking that you’re talking about?” – “We’re only pretending, we’re building bridges between them - it’s a charitable act." Like two buoys cut adrift, entwined together and sharing hopeless, boozy days and nights, friends Vincent (Anthony Bajon) – a young thirtysomething lover of literature (whose tastes range from the Anthology of French Poetry to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish) - and fifty-something Gaby (Olivier Gourmet) - who’s never seen without his well-worn, studded, rocker jacket - are hatching a plan to get themselves out of a fix (they’re 30,000 euros in debt which needs to be repaid in 15 days if they’re looking to avoid violence) caused by Vincent’s humanist brainwave of freeing hundreds of battery-farmed chickens.

For this reason, they decide to rob a cash-in-transit van managed by a team whose leader is experiencing deep-seated communication issues with his 17-year-old son, which he woefully shares with Vincent in a bar. Whence the idea of reconciling father and son by kidnapping the latter and forcing the former to open the van so that the friends can seize the loot. The hapless duo rope their buddy Avril (Ella Benoit) into this outlandish scheme, who’s just as anchorless as them. But, as a song our three anti-heroes hear in a bar advises: "if you meet another lost soul, take care not to follow her, that siren will pull you down." So success is hardly a given…

Centred on characters "struggling with life in this world" and steeped in an anarcho-libertarian spirit ("we don’t say steal, we say liberate", "who do you rob when you hit an armoured truck?” – “The banks” – “…who are reimbursed by their insurers, so you’re not hurting anyone") tinged with a pervasive sense of sadness (loneliness, "losers", toxic family karma, living on the brink of destitution, the grinding financial challenges faced by the working classes, etc.), Rain Dogs turns lead into gold thanks to the friendship conveyed by three excellent actors and the film’s highly likeable Italian-style caper comedy which has airs of the western about it. It’s an everyman’s Heat: well-paced, buoyant, unpretentious (in the best sense) and fuelled by an undeniable though never ostentatious social authenticity, imbued with a generous spirit: "I believe all men have a little bit of love in them."

Rain Dogs was produced by Marianne Productions and TS Productions, in co-production with Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne Cinéma and Belgian company Les Films du Fleuve. Best Friend Forever are handling international sales.