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If Lucas Delangle had taken another angle with his film The Strange Case of Jacky Caillou, things would have been entirely different. This is one of those cases in which a premise is in a natural course for something opposite than what a director decides to do, and things work out for the best. It’s not very frequent because of risk, something Delangle observes in the beginning but approaches it with extreme confidence in his story, and most of all, in how a character can steal away the essence and claim the film as his own universe.
You will find different versions of the title online, and perhaps this is for the best. It adds a bit more mystery about the story, and in the case of Delangle’s naturalist and grounded take on fantasy, we can’t say it doesn’t help to make the final message a bit more blunt: faith is a natural element that even non-spiritual people draw on at the some point in their lives. We appeal to something supernatural, we believe in the power of belief and we think the unthinkable will save us in presence of something we can’t quite figure out. There’s nothing more human than that, and it shouldn’t be strange. The Strange Case of… should be The Story of.
But let’s believe for a second.
In The Strange Case of Jacky Caillou, a young wannabe musician lives with his grandmother. She’s a healer and people seek her help all the time. Their house is more of a waiting room. Jacky doesn’t understand how she does what she does. He simply listens on the other side of the door to her method that includes Christian prayers and… magnetism?
When she dies, Jacky decides to try to heal. The patient is a young woman who arrives at his home with a very strange spot on her back. He tries what his grandma tried and realizes this is not the usual case of a disease that can be cured by praying or by putting his hands close to her back. I won’t reveal what she actually is, but let’s just say animal corpses appearing around town have something to do with Elsa’s scars.
This is Thomas Parigi‘s show. The young actor’s debut is fantastic to say the least. His expression of fear combined with curiosity is the force driving the film’s first half. In the second, it stumbles a bit as it gets predictable and not very interesting. When it’s time to conclude and confirm what’s up with Elsa’s secret, The Strange Case of Jacky Caillou becomes an application of dull genre rules that almost don’t connect with the emotional approach in the beginning. Parigi saves the film because his character is erratic and follows a natural course, but it’s enough to make the audience excited for what will ultimately happen with Elsa and Jacky.
Is it important? Not really. The realism is what drives The Strange Case of Jacky Caillou away from the genre that’s implied when the film reveals its true setting, and it works until the very end. No special effects or great makeup design. Just a poor man trying to deal with a phenomenon that can’t be cured with his hands. Faith is key for Jacky’s acts, but sometimes it makes him do desperate things.
Founder of Screentology. Member of the OFCS. RT Certified Critic
Dog dad.
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– Armessa Movie News