Solène Delinger 08:00, February 14, 2024

Canal+ is broadcasting this Wednesday, February 14, the first two episodes of “Bachelor Party”, its new tender and caustic series following a group of friends faced with the loss of one of their own. Panayotis Pascot and Fary shine in this comedy where men, who have been taught never to cry, finally break through the armor. 

Series and films about men are no longer really on the rise... Seven years after the advent of the #MeToo movement, it was high time for fiction to address questions around masculinity, oh how necessary in the fight for gender equality. With

Bachelor Party

, its new four-episode series, Canal+ is taking the subject head on. 

Five friends who engage in introspection

The pitch is simple: five friends spend an evening together after losing one of their own, Daniel, Paul's brother (Panayotis Pascot). The opportunity for them to honor his memory and share their grief. Except that Paul, Adib (Adib Alkhalidey), Noah (Fary), Zach (Jason Brokerss), and Oscar (Guillermo Guiz) are not the strongest at expressing their emotions.... "They are obviously going to talk about everything except the elephant in the room which is their missing friend", comments Panayotis during the presentation conference of the series.

Our five friends will talk about everything and nothing, and open up little by little throughout their evening. “These are men who delve inside themselves, which is something that the masculinity of another time did not allow,” analyzes Panayotis. In

 Bachelor Party

, Paul and his friends never stop questioning their behavior, their relationship with family, love and death (why haven't they been able to cry since the announcement of the disappearance of Daniel?).

Certainties shaken

So many existential questions that shake up their certainties about masculinity. Zach, for example, lies to himself: he is depressed but doesn't say it, for fear of appearing "weak". His friend Noah is convinced of this: a “real man” has many conquests and cannot commit. However, he has only seen one woman, Mona, for six months. But it’s impossible for him to call himself a couple! "My character convinces himself that to be a man is to be a ladies' man. He revels in this idea. He will discover that he is falling in love and that does not make him someone "a weak one", underlines Fary, also present at the press conference.

It is thanks to his friends, who push him to his limits, that Noah finds the strength to speak to Mona. The scene is extremely funny: Noah arrives in the middle of the night at the hospital where Mona, a nurse, works, because Paul has just had his nose broken in a strip club. Noah interrupts her while she is tending to a patient. Finally decided to declare his love for her, he launches into a monologue but the words have difficulty coming out... "I was in a strip club and it didn't do anything for me at all, I was cold, neutral", he says in all sincerity under Mona's scandalized gaze. “So what?” she replies, annoyed. “He’s trying to tell you he’s gay,” his patient intervenes under Noah’s stunned gaze. It smells good and is tasty!

Laughter as a defense mechanism

In

Bachelor Party

, the omnipresent comedy dresses up the drama. Laughter is in fact a defense mechanism for these five friends who throw jokes at each other all the time. A way to escape their dramatic reality. "We see comedy less as a genre than as a language. So for us, being able to tell dramatic things through comedy is obvious. It's like choosing a language and there are no limits of subjects or genres that we could tell with this language,” confides Fary. 

“We laughed a lot when it was filming,” adds Panayotis. And you can feel it! We see real friends debating, bickering, remaking the world. The pace is brisk, the punchlines follow one another and it's no coincidence: our five troublemakers all come from the world of stand-up and all participated in the writing of the series. “There was an almost fraternal solidarity obviously, but humorous between us. We all wanted everyone to have the best score according to their own instrument,” explains Panayotis who also took his first steps as a director with his friend Adib Alkhalidey.

The result of their joint work is a real little poetic gem, funny, spicy, gentle and sensitive, like the men they are.