Saison 1 épisode 2
By Phoenix Atala – Grand Magasin Collective
At this stage in the game/By now, we’re starting to think that Grand Magasin will always be Grand Magasin. After twenty years as a collective, you can recognize its members right from their first line. They’re always half-pop, half-kitsch, in skirts, t-shirts, or pants that are too short and fluorescent-coloured. And they can still astonish with new gestures, umpteen raspberries to be taken literally, new tiny phrases that are as absurd as they are obvious. An inseparable band of serious oddballs.
Initially, there was Pascale Murtin and François Hiffler, defectors from the world of dance in 1982. The thirty-year-old Phoenix Atala who joined up in 2000 is a perfect match. Season 1 Episode 2 is his brainchild, a film made without any prior technical knowledge, and that is what makes it so good. As a director-in-training, Phoenix asks questions from his spot on the stage about this marvelous world where someone can instantly go from the 1st to the 31st floor in an elevator. With him, a missing shot can be filled in with sequences of Serbian folk dancing… Unless it’s not your style of humor, you’ll very quickly be smiling out of delightful disbelief. Because, when you think about it, there are a thousand and one ways of seeing things, a thousand and one scales of measurement, a thousand and one wonderful incongruities that ostensibly puncture reality… even though we had tried so hard not to see them.
Cathy Blisson
Telerama n° 3042 – 03 mai 2008