Focus on French Cinema - French Film Festival of Greenwich

2009

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	Genre: COMEDY
	Director: Philippe Muyl
	Screenplay: Philippe Muyl
	Music & Songs: Bruno Caliciuri, Cali
	Director of photography: Pierre Gill
	Cast: Marie Gillain (Betty) Cali (Baptiste) Antoine Duléry ( Auguste) Louis Dussol (Tommy)
	Running time:1hr 31min Production: France-Canada, 2007 Distributor:Paramount Pictures France ›› OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Magique
Magic

FAMILY MOVIE
Sponsored by La Délégation Générale du Québec in New York & L’organisation Internationale de la Francophonie
Introduction by Habiba Boumlik, Professor of Anthropology at Purchase College.

A musical set in the countryside of Québec, Magique! tells the story of a ten-year old boy, Tommy (Louis Dussol) who wants nothing more than to make his independent, hard working and melancholy mother, Betty (Marie Gillain), happy again. When a traveling circus troupe gets stuck in a nearby town, the boy sees his chance to bring lightness and joy back into his mother’s life, and so he persuades her to allow the troupe to camp out in a field near their farm. Among the circus performers, there is an acrobat named Baptiste (played by singer Cali in his first cinematic role; he also composed the film’s music), who begins to draw Betty out of her isolation.

Director’s quote
The film belongs, I think, in the category “poetic realism”. It begins in an everyday, realistic tone, and very gradually it acquires a poetic inflection; by the end it resurfaces in reality, but one that is henceforth poeticized.

To put it briefly, the magic of childhood displaces the solemnity of ordinary reality. On this lovely theme, Philippe Muyl embroiders diverse variations; on family, dislocated and put back together; on the tenderness that soothes the pain of isolation; on the world of spectacle, with its joie de vivre and heartfelt generosity.. – Marie-Noëlle Tranchant, Figaroscope

Philippe Muyl, director
›› Biography
Les Enfants de la Lune (in production)
2008 Magique
2002 Le Papillon (The Butterfly)
2000 La Vache et le Président (A Cow and the Boy)
1997 Tout doit disparaître
1993 Cuisine et dependences (Kitchen with Apartment)
1985 L’Arbre sous la mer

Marie Gillain, Actress
Marie Gillain is a Belgian actress(born in 1975 Liège, Belgium). She received the Prix Romy Schneider in 1996. She was only 16 when she made a splash as the precocious teenager in the French hit My Father the Hero (1991, with Gerard Depardieu). In the U.S. she is mainly known as the adopted daughter (and, oddly, love interest) of Daniel Auteuil in the 1997 swashbuckler On Guard (French title Le Bossu). Her other films include Absolument fabuleux (2001) and L'Enfer (2005).