Thalasso takes over where the previous fake documentary, The Kidnapping by Michel Houellebecq (2014) ended. There, the French author and provocateur were kidnapped by a Polish-French family with Jönssonligan connotation. Houellebecq was quite happy with the situation and preferred the "ordinary" family's social life to that of the French parnass.
In Thalasso, he is not kidnapped but well placed at a health facility on the Atlantic coast, a so-called thalasso spa, to breathe some healthy life into his body and bud if possible. No smoking, no wine and diet food - that's for the author what kryptonite was for Superman. Life-threatening. At least mentally so.
Fortunately, he finds another forced customer / patient, including a man who has run the street in French media, the actor Gérard Depardieu - who turns out to be a more scarred spa visitor who knows how to smuggle wine and cig, and together form they are a bumbling and bulging anarchist duo in a tightly controlled environment.
No, it is not directly a work of the time. Two middle-aged white men who hurt the world comment on women's bodies, and act in different ways. Two representatives of the then world power of the cultural world, now adapted to a health home with cold showers and even cooler cryo treatment which, very symbolically, causes the genitals to freeze, shrink - fall off. Well, once it actually went just as bad, Gérard tells Michel - just when it should be squeezed into the cryo container, where the temperature drops to minus 70 degrees.
As I said, a seriously old- fashioned movie, and just for that reason, the refreshing and the old-fashioned are actually little entertaining in their fundamental egocentrism. Miserable. One is stinking oily, the other curved and toothless. Literally so. "It is difficult to eat meat with loose teeth, but goose liver is good anyway," the author notes dryly. But eloquent. Like a mix of Simma calm, Larry and Lasse Åbergs Hälsoresan.
It is not entirely unreasonable to think that Thalasso's harsh cleanliness regime is a metaphor for the politically correct society that both shed. Sweden is worst when it comes to this matter, says Houellebecq in an early scene, recycled from the Kidnapping by Michel Houellebecq: A dictatorship where one cannot speak or think freely.
Otherwise, it feels most like a half-planned improvisation exercise, with no major goals. But okay, it's also about aging, as a human being and as a celebrity.
"The awful thing about getting old is that you stay young," Houellebecq says, in a nice summary of the feeling of getting older. He talks about death not existing; believe in "bodily resurrection", which is an impossible concept that confuses both Depardieu and the Signatory. When the author is about to explain, he begins to cry - and one assumes that Death still has an advanced position in his interior.
The self-confidence that permeates the provocateur's often insightful and entertaining literature stands in both films in stark contrast to the one he plays / is in the film. Here he looks like a fragile person without the (sexual) power of the main characters in his novels. Neither does the intellect appear as sharp or important. Here, the provocateur dares to show himself throughout his shabby, shamefaced and vulnerable revelation.
Which sets him apart from many other cervulants. That and the self-indulgent, laconic humor that makes you never really know where you got him, and which also makes Thalasso an interesting creation.