La Gueule Ouverte

After the success of his Arte mini-series Ceux qui rougissent, film director and actor Julien Gaspar-Oliveri returns to directing, continuing to work with young performers.

It's a play about the impossibility of saying. In La Gueule Ouverte, no realism, but a sense of reality. A fable about intra-family ties: a brother and sister choose to confront their father by settling accounts in an attempt to name the violence suffered in their childhood. The characters exhaust the language, which never ceases to deconstruct itself. Julien Gaspar-Oliveri, who is as much a film director as a stage director, creates a cinematographic aesthetic on the stage, with a highly physical, oratorical style. The set design is uncluttered. Costumes are colorful. The audience is spread out on either side of the stage, creating a corridor from which the performers come and go. The use of off-screen effects adds another echo to the narrative. To accompany the physical and mental overcoming of the characters, techno-tinged music is heard, the piece being conceived as a continuous climb, like a tightening vise. From father to brother, mother to sister, all the characters are played by young people of the same age, making the transmission of family patterns palpable.