The opening frame of Blaise sets the audience up for a story of all-too-ordinary people trying to fit in. Blaise (Timéo) is 16 and sitting between his parents Carole (Léa Drucker) and Jacques (Jacques Gamblin) Sauvage in a meeting with a school counsellor (name). It’s not that Blaise has done anything alarming, he hasn’t done much of anything at all. “Isolated,” is the polite term the counsellor uses. “No friends” is the reality. Blaise melts into the background wherever he goes and that’s fine by him. He’s anxious and shy. Carole asks if Blaise might be “gifted?” The answer in the negative comes perhaps a bit too swiftly. Jacques then relates his history of isolation when he was at school which he puts down to his allergies to apple scented cleaning products. It takes a long time for his monologue to end and by the end of it, Jacques has decided he has found a new therapist and Blaise recedes into the background again.
What makes the scene more absurd than the oversharing of Jacques is the collaged photomontage style designed by co-director and co-writer Dimitri Planchon who also created the graphic novels the film is adapted from. Stumpy people who are comic and uncanny with hair that never moves and photorealistic aspects. Blaise is, simply put, bizarre and wonderful to look at which amplifies it’s somewhat absurd and zany narrative about people who really have “zero cool” which is rather un-Parisian in its way.
The Sauvage family want to fit in. Carole is newly promoted from a job where people disliked her because she didn’t quite know how to relate to them. Jacques was responsible for Blaise’s home upbringing and has never held a job nor does he really have friends. In the eyes of Carole’s best friend Marisa (Béatrice Chermany) he was until very recently a “moron” she put up with because he was married to Carole. Jacques’ mother finds him embarrassing and juvenile. Blaise is somewhat forced to go along with Marisa’s daughter Laura (Colombine Oudard) to a “protest” (read party where politics is discussed) and finds himself agreeing with whatever is said simply to be a part of what’s going on. He catches the eye of Joséphine (Nina Blanc-Francard) who is at the party to feel like she’s rebelling against her bourgeoise father but was taken along by the family’s housemaid Rosalie (Isabelle Sempéré). The host of the party, Max (Antoine Esmerian-Lesimple) is also playing a part as a true revolutionary ready to use violence against the current President Barbara Lazurus (Carole Franck).
Blaise, taking on aspects of other personalities he has encountered, pretends he lives in public housing in a distant Parisian suburb and when Joséphine suggests they go back to his place he tries to avoid the interaction. Instead, she ends up driving him to a place he’s never been and he uses the excuse that his mother is ill so he can’t invite her in. Joséphine reveals her mother is dead, suicide, but hopes that doesn’t put too much of a dampener on any further communication. The fact that Blaise is 16 and middle-class, and she a young adult of significant wealth, means that both of them will pretend to be someone else as their relationship evolves with potentially disastrous consequences.
Although Blaise is a kind of connective tissue to the increasingly outrageous comedy of (questionable) manners, Jean-Paul Guigue and Dimitri Planchon arguably give his parents equally bizarre encounters. Carole has been promoted to department manager in Gérard Durieux Valois’ (Nicholas Lormeau) stone company – Durieux Valois is Joséphine’s father, not that it is ever revealed and believes because his famous father General Durieux Valois once hosted President Lazurus in his home when they were children that a large government contract is imminent. Carole is told that Durieux Valois cannot have unhappy workers and she must do all she can to care for her team (including smiling). As much as she tries Carole manages perhaps ten-minutes with her new team before two of them are crying, most specifically Nadia Legarek (Nathalie Kanoui). In trying to not offend Nadia again Carole goes to absurd lengths to over-explain what she means and soften anything that might seem like a criticism. Some of the best and funniest cringe comedy comes from Carole and Nadia’s interactions which become liberating for Carole in an unexpected, but definitely not unpleasurable, manner.
However, it is Jacques who really fails to gain any kind of respect and no matter what conversations he has with Marisa, his mother, the poor school counsellor, he knows that he’s not making a positive impression and resorts to the petty rebellion of refusing to wear a seatbelt. Later, a passed around grenade eventually goes off and still Jacques wants to get clarity on how it is not his fault that he’s seen as an idiot.
Blaise is delightful and also enough to make you cover your eyes and groan as character after character makes assumptions and tries to prove they’re something they aren’t. The Sauvage family really just wants to get along with people and go on holidays, but instead they end up caught in revolutions, office scandals, and never quite getting “it.” A fabulous and inventive deadpan comedy about being the squarest pegs rendered in a brilliantly odd animation style.
Directors: Jean-Paul Guigue and Dimitri Planchon
Screenplay: Dimitri Planchon and Clémence Lebatteux
Cast: Léa Drucker, Timéo, Jacques Gamblin, Nina Blanc-Francard, Carole Franck
Music: Alexis Pecharman and Denis Vautrin
Blaise played at Fantasia International Film Festival 2026