Stéphane
What Timothée lacks in resources and connections he optimistically hopes to make up for with talent, ambition and enthusiasm, working on his fourth short film, serving as writer and director and all on-location technical roles, guiding his friends Laëtitia and Émile through the scene for his homage to the American spy thrillers of his youth.
A stranger walking into the shot, Timothée politely asks him to move, but the stranger is suddenly interested, introducing himself as Stéphane, a stuntman and practical effects expert who offers his services, talking of his experience and the names he has worked with, Timothée seeing an opportunity to expand his short film without realising it will also be radically reshaped.
A micro-budget feature oddity of aspiration and deception written and directed by Timothée Hochet and Lucas Pastor, the latter of whom also stars as the titular character, Stéphane stars Bastien Garcia as Timothée, naïve and easily led, initially entranced by the older man who offers him opportunity while missing the obvious that he is a bad-tempered show-off and a fantasist.
Stéphane initially toying with Timothée, seeing how far he is willing to go in order to play with the “in crowd,” the aspiring director begins to see the man as a character in and of himself, considering that he might be a subject for a documentary made in parallel with his rapidly evolving project which is now a wartime romance where Stéphane is the heroic leading man giving awkward line readings and demanding creative control.
The sullen new leading lady Bianca (Eva Gregorieff) apparently not speaking a word of French, or perhaps any other language, Stéphane’s eccentricities do not translate well to film, refusing to be shot candidly while not performing scenes and with Timothée having to remind him not to look at the camera, frustrations foolishly expressed in his own recorded confessions of his misgivings, the thin bridge of trust between the two burning faster than it can be rebuilt.
A one-joke riff on the strange world of filmmaking more amateur than auteur which somewhat overstays its shelf life despite the contrasting genial and oddball performances of Garcia and the unpredictable Pastor, Stéphane has moments of uncomfortable uncertainty, confusion and surprise which carry it in part but a conclusion and bizarre twist which could have arrived considerably earlier with no sense that much of significance had been omitted.
Stéphane is streaming on the Arrow platform now
