Cinema The Plough

This is the story of a family of puppeteers. A traveling puppet theatre is legacy of three siblings Louis, Martha and Lena, who put on puppet shows under the guidance of their father, who runs the company, and their grandmother, who makes the puppets. Together, over many years and wherever they went, they enchanted audiences with their stories. But their fate changes radically when the father dies suddenly. The remaining family members keep the show running and try to keep legacy alive. A family of artists torn between transmission and emancipation.

Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival, this family drama by Philippe Garrel features performances by his three children: Louis, Esther and Lena Garrel. The Plough – El Chariot explores the legacy we leave to our children.

Philippe Garrel has made a very personal film, showing how important it was for him to film with his family. His children are the actors in this family of puppeteers. He was inspired by his father, Maurice Garrel, who, before becoming an actor, was a puppet maker and a puppeteer in Gaston Baty’s troupe, and Garrel's godfather was the famous puppeteer Alain Recoing, creator of the Théâtre aux Mains Nues in Paris. A childhood lived and marked by puppetry. It's also no coincidence that the director chose Aurélien Recoing, Alain Recoing's son, for the role of the father.

Philippe Garrel Statement's

“I wanted to make a film with my three children, who have successively become actors over the last few years with other directors (I certainly didn't want to attach them to myself by being the first to hire them). I realized that representing the family is a pleasure usually reserved for painters. since my children are aged 22, 30 and 38, I had to find a reason to bring them together at those ages. I thought about drawing a family of puppeteers, because there have been many and there are still some.

When I was born, my father, before he became an actor, was a puppeteer in Gaston Baty's company, which also included Alain Recoing, who was my godfather. I wrote the script with Jean-Claude Carrière, Arlette Langmann and Caroline Deruas.

The actors and I met every Saturday to rehearse all the scenes in the film, as well as the parts for the puppet shows. Gaston Baty wrote these repertory scenes, as did Eloi Recoing, one of Alain Recoing's sons. Gaston Baty was part of the Cartel with Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin and Georges Pitoëff, he wrote and acted in their puppet theatre.

When I was a child, these artists, who were very poor, seemed like kings to me, and I wanted to make a film that, although born in the imagination, imitated a documentary about this corporation (it was Jean-Luc Godard who said that good fiction must also be a documentary about something). You'll find in this film the idea that I want to see in the disintegration of a puppet company, that of a metaphor for a world where traditions are dying.”

“The script of Philippe Garrel’s latest film is forged from steel, with camera movements as precise as the microscopic mechanisms of a Swiss watch. Such respect for the inner life of his characters is shown that we enter their consciences without the need for a single word to express their specific condition. Set in the present day, the story focuses on the vicissitudes of a family of puppeteers. The father, his mother and his three children have been performing different children’s theatre classics for decades. They have a small theatre in front of their house and also tour the country. Their company is well-known and respected and has overcome obstacles of all kinds for that very reason. However, misfortune leads to a new challenge and everything changes. At this crossroads, Garrel imagines two opposing ideas that threaten the present situation: upholding a tradition can be exhausting or even fatal on the one hand, even as older artistic forms like puppet theatre can easily feel inadequate due to younger generations’ lack of interest in them. Le Grand Charior raises a question that hardly just concerns the world of puppeteers: how can a tradition that has become a minority practice, like Garrel’s cinema, resist?” - Roger Koza, Viennale.at