DELETE HISTORY
France, 2020, France, 2020, 108 minutes, Colour.
Blanche Gardin, Dennis Podalydes, Corinne Maeiro, Vincent Lacoste.
Directed by Benoit Delepine, Gustave Kervero.
This is a French satire on contemporary technology, how it is consumed, how it consumes everyone. It is a French comedy – and its style is directed towards a French audience and its sense of humour. For many it was a laugh out loud. For those who do not have a French sensitivity, it does not seem so funny in the hilarious sense but rather in the sense of its jokes about technology, its parody of human behaviour, some stand-up comic moments.
The film focuses on three central characters and their misadventures.
First is Marie, with a teenage son, trying to sell goods online but failing. She is also prone to pratfalls and mishaps. She also drinks. She encounters a young man in a bar who seems to know something about her, goes home with him and, when he turns up again, and she not remembering anything, he tells her he has a compromising sexual video and asks for €10,000 in blackmail. She tries various ways to find ways of recovering the video or, at least, of deleting it. She goes to several companies but fails. Eventually, she travels to the United States to central holding companies of videos. She is treated well by an executive – but he also makes sex videos and compromises her. She retreats angrily and finally decides that it is not worth the trouble, especially after she has the opportunity to warn her son against looking at the Internet.
Marie is friendly with Bertrand, recently widowed, concerned about his daughter. He becomes the target of a phone voice, Miranda from Mauritius, who tries to persuade him to purchase goods online. He falls in love with the voice, sexual behaviour, and finally decides to fly to Mauritius to find her. He has pretended to fly to Ireland to solve some of his other problems. When in Mauritius, he shocked to find that Miranda is merely a machine, recorded insinuating voice.
Thirdly, there is Christine, who belongs to a company supplying drivers. She is friendly with both Marie and Bertrand. She is also addicted to television series and there are some funny lines about this, audiences perhaps recognising that they too are somewhat addicted. She is also disappointed with some of her clients who do not give her star ratings at the company. She is determined to find an agency which will add stars – and, there is a funny joke, where she contacted a company in India and the camera draws back to show hundreds of people at computers adding stars to driver reports.
The three get some advice and go to a hacker who has his office in a wind machine and who calls himself God. He does his best – but finds that God is not in control of quite a number of aspects of the cyber world.
The actors are persuasive in their roles. While there is a narrative, it is rather the individual gags, something like stand-up comedy, which work the best.
