[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

At the beginning of Manoel de Oliveira’s I’m Going Home (2001), Michel Piccoli’s aging actor Gilbert Valance is on stage playing King Berenger, the dying monarch from Ionesco’s Exit the King, in denial of his waning capabilities. When Valance is struck by tragedy himself, he responds by clinging to his daily routine, reprising familiar roles and putting up a front to keep grief at bay.

Jean-Luc, the main character in François-Christophe Marzal’s Ah que le bonheur est proche, shares something of Berenger and Valance’s rage against the dying of the (spot)light. Played by veteran of the Swiss stage and screen Jean-Luc Bideau – who yesterday received a Pardo Speciale alla Carriera in a ceremony at the Piazza Grande – this fictive Jean-Luc is an elderly actor prone to forgetfulness and even hallucinations, and inspires little confidence that he will be able to pull off the lead in a new Don Quixote adaptation he is helping to mount. Jean-Luc is furious when he discovers that the production, compelled by the insurance company, has hired an understudy to shadow him.

Driven by resentment but also curiosity, Jean-Luc attempts to follow his stand-in, determined to coax or threaten him to withdraw from the assignment – but he proves enigmatic. The old man’s Hitchcockian pursuit of his double takes him further away from sanity, blurring reality, memory, and fantasy. Does this mystery man, with a penchant for collecting celebrity teeth, really exist? His perception of the world completely warped, Jean-Luc becomes Don Quixote more thoroughly than he could ever be on stage.

Despite the sophisticated mise en abyme at its centre, Marzal’s compact film adopts an unpretentious form that keeps the narrative fleet-footed. Shot in an unadorned, almost sitcom style, this absurdist comedy weds viewers to the protagonist’s unreliable perspective, enlisting us as accomplices in his battle against the human condition. The secondary cast, with an evident flair for slapstick, is pitted against Jean-Luc’s irate, imposing seriousness to often hilarious effect.

Channelling his screen persona in a tongue-in-cheek manner, Bideau, who has collaborated with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Raúl Ruiz, and William Friedkin as well as Alain Turner and Michel Soutter, plays a version of himself – a fact underlined by a co-actor tossing famous film lines of his at him to test his memory. Hunched over a walking stick, Bideau portrays Jean-Luc as a wily, indomitable spirit unwilling to submit to the vagaries of age and health. Marzal’s film is above all a loving tribute to this revered figure of the New Swiss Cinema.