We noticed “June and John”, the “Bonnie and Clyde” by Luc Besson filmed on the smartphone | EUROtoday

Visual bet, story riddled with clichés

The nice John lives in Los Angeles a stressed setting life, under pressure. Between two handfuls of anxiolytics, he works as an accountant in a bank, where he is harassed by his boss, the parkingian goalkeeper, his mother necessarily possessive. Soon, he falls under the spell of June, a young woman who wears a colorful wig, who breaks his bank and takes him to Las Vegas, assuring him that she has only 72 hours to live …

Filmed without authorization during the covid, therefore, with a reduced team, June & John is formally stunning. The first image, which recalls Adam Driver at the top of his skyscraper in Megalopolis From Francis Ford Coppola, is extraordinary of contrast, colors, with a depth of field which appears full pot on the screen of the Grand Rex. This is not the first time that a film has been fully shot on the smartphone and Steven Soderbergh, Sean Baker or Park Chan-Wook have already tried the experience, just like Danny Boyle and her highly anticipated 28 years laterFilm of Living Dead at 75 million captured at the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Luc Besson takes up this challenge hands down.

But a film is first and foremost a story … and this one was, alas, was written by Luc Besson. Aged 66, the man produced nearly 100 films, wrote not far from 70 and made around twenty. From the point of view of the scripts, these are most often works below sea level, misogynists, sometimes conveying an ideology … questionable. But Besson’s great recurring obsession remains the woman: object of passive desire, linking male pleasure to the eroticization of violence. Under his pen, women, regularly, are, as desired, unmanageable characteristics, lolitas teases or warriors in panties. In its CV, the exceptions to this typical profile exist fortunately, but they are counted on the fingers of one hand.

In June & Johnthat does not miss: we end up with a howling kid in the body of a top model, which draws a gun or her little dress all the time, dreams only of thrills (parachuting, marriage to Vegas …) and crazy love. June & John is an ode to passion, Besson version, with definitive sentences like “Men can now not dream.” They only know how to count. ” The film has the psychology of a photo novel and the characters have the thickness of a rolling sheet. To hide the void and boredom, Luc Besson films his June riding the streets, jumping from a plane without parachute, trampoline on a bed, diving dressed in a swimming pool, with a bonus some cops equipped with weapons of war but dropped in this Bonnie & Clyde hysterical, cheap and kitsch…