A veteran filmmaker shooting his next project about a factory worker uprising finds fiction and reality colliding as he faces an impending film shutdown and a crew strike in “Making Of,” a social comedy from director Cédric Kahn.
Simon (Denis Podalydes), a well-known French director, has just started shooting his next film. It’s a tragedy and social critique inspired by a story Simon came across of a group of workers who fought back against their factory shutdown but were unsuccessful. Many of the factory workers play themselves in Simon’s film, and he is committed to capturing their journey, emotional turmoil and importantly the unhappy conclusion to their protest.
Unfortunately, days into shooting Simon loses his biggest financial backing for the project after his major investors withdraw over creative differences about the film’s ending. Simon has a tough choice: he can either resign himself to rewriting the script with a happy Hollywood ending that doesn’t reflect the reality of the working class and the workers’ ordeal, or he can hold out and risk the film being shut down.
As Simon tries to stick by his own fierce beliefs and what he views as his commitment to the workers, he faces backlash and battles on all fronts. The crew are unhappy and threatening to walk after learning they might not get paid, Simon’s lead actors are constantly butting heads and disrupting shooting, and Simon might have to cut parts of his script anyway under the constraints of the new budget. On top of everything, Simon’s personal life is also in shambles as his wife and kids struggle with the time and distance of Simon’s busy life in the film industry.
While the project walks the precipice of total disaster, one person is there to capture it all: Joseph (Stefan Crepon), a local background actor with a desire to get into film. He is hired by Simon to film the “making of the film,” tasked with capturing as much behind-the-scenes footage as possible. Meanwhile, Joseph gets more involved on set and strikes up a romance with Nadia (Souheila Yacoub), the lead actress.
Although he hired Joseph on a bit of a whim, Simon comes to see in Joseph a reflection of his own past self. Where Simon is now weighed down by exhaustion and the personal toll his career has had on his family, Joseph carries the youthful energy and passion for film that Simon once possessed.
From the outside, it seems like a hugely ambitious task to try and do justice to so many different plots, relationships and character conflicts; however, Making Of weaves between its multiple intersecting storylines in a highly engaging and seamless manner. Every facet of the overall story is connected in some way so that it’s easy for the audience to move between them and for the film to build on the overlapping tension, emotions, and comedy.
Indeed, Making Of is quite playful as it injects plenty of levity. With a sharp script written by Kahn, Fanny Burden and Samuel Doux, and a strong cast led by Podalydes, the film uses itself as a means of humorously critiquing hypocrisies found within and beyond the industry. As Kahn wrote in his director’s statement, it’s “a social comedy with cinema as its backdrop: a world which defends noble causes while reproducing its social inequalities.”
Given Simon’s commitment to maintaining his own film’s tragic ending, we’re never sure how Making Of itself is going to end — happy, tragic, or somewhere in between? It’s every bit worth watching to find out.
Making Of had its world premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival in the Out of Competition section.
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