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Join Telegram ChannelPreviewed at the La Rochelle Fiction Festival, the series starring Laure Calamy is a hard-hitting psychological thriller.
Christelle would not miss an Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris under any circumstances. But on November 13, 2015, this forty-something who still lives with her mother skips it. Which doesn't stop her, the day after the attacks, from getting in touch with a number of survivors on social media. Hours and hours of listening to these testimonies, of giving her unwavering support. At the same time, she invents a friend in a coma, supposedly shot at the Bataclan. The beginning of a vicious spiral of lies, which will lead “Chris” to become the cornerstone of a victims' association. There, everyone loves his cheekiness and his boundless energy. No one suspects anything.
Broke and thrown out by her mother, Chris crosses the red line a second time by discreetly trying to get compensation from a support fund, pretending that she narrowly escaped the terrorists that night. Until her story begins to arouse suspicion…
True story
The success ofA devoted friend obviously owes a lot to its “true story” stamp: freely adapted from the novel by Alexandre Kauffmann, The Bataclan Mythomaniacthe series is inspired by the crazy trajectory of Florence M., a repeat con artist and pathological liar. But this rather relentless psychological thriller escapes the trap of a story based solely on a succession of real facts, preferring to delve deeply into Chris' psychology. Without necessarily needing to go through dialogues, simply through the looks and nocturnal anxieties of this character impeccably played by a subtle Laure Calamy. Opposite her, a beautiful cast of supporting roles, including Arieh Worthalter (The Goldman Trial) as president of the association, extremely charismatic without having to do too much. The elegant and tense staging of Just Philippot (the director of The Cloud And Acid imposes his mark on a playing field where he was not expected) does the rest.
The suspense, however, rests on a simple question: when will Chris be unmasked? The outcome is written in advance, which does not prevent A devoted friend to operate in a permanent tension where the slightest error of this false saint would make her house of cards collapse. We watch her sink into lies, demonstrate terrifying audacity in an attempt to maintain her cover (great scene with the journalists from Paris Match)… The true and the false mix, we no longer know very well if she ends up believing what she says. And in the meantime, tick-tock, the clock is ticking…
We often think about The Adversary : Chris' story is basically the same as Jean-Claude Romand's, without the murders at the end. But the victims, psychologically wounded, are very real.
A Devoted Friend was previewed at the La Rochelle Fiction Festival. Other episodes can be seen from October 11 on the Max platform.