With Critical Failure , Phoenix Atala continues his joyful and welcome enterprise of deconstructing the cinema industry. After the principles and rules of screenwriting revisited in his last work (experimental web series La Formule , 2017), here is the audiovisual industry, its modes of production, its standards, its unspoken things, its hypocrisies and other pseudo-benevolences put through the mill. The subject of the film? Another film, the one that Youssef and Désiré•e are trying to make, a "queer, militant, decolonial, racialized, no-budget film" in Désiré·e's words. One by one, the stages follow one another, from the casting and its sidesteps to the end and its aftermath, as with any blockbuster.
A queer film, then, but also speculative: set in a future anchored in our present, conducted in a comedy tone, taking place in a universe mixing musical comedy and militant dystopian-utopian science fiction, with Atala himself as director. In the sights of the filmmaker and the characters, as it is sung, "cinema, the film industry, propaganda of the heterosexual order". The aim of this double-edged blow? To invent a form in line with one's personal experience. Critical Failure is a corrosive aesthetic-political satire, embellished with a good dose of self-mockery and which does not preach. Like the duo of artists involved in the making of their film, Phoenix Atala questions the systems of domination and the paths to its emancipation. A meta-film as theoretical as it is practical, as a method for making cinema differently.
Nicolas Feodoroff