Astérix & Obélix l'empire du milieu
Director: Guillaume Canet
Screenplay: Guillaume Canet
Julien Hervé
Philip Mechelen
:Main actors
Guillaume Canet
Gilles Lellouche
Vincent Kassel
Jonathan Cohen
Marion Cotillard
Julie Chen
Leanna Chea
Production companies :Albert René Editions
The Terrible Children
Pathé
Treasure Movies
Country of production :France
Genre:Adventure comedy
Running time:111 minutes
Release:2023
Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom is a French film directed by Guillaume Canet, released in 2023
This is the fifth live-action film in the Asterix and Obelix series and the adaptation of the characters created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
It is also the first live-action film based on an original story, as well as the first of this series in which Obelix is not played by Gérard Depardieu but by Gilles Lellouche. The budget of this film amounts to 66 million euros, which makes it one of the most expensive French films ever produced
The Middle Kingdom receives mostly negative reviews. In France, the Allociné website offers an average of press reviews of 2.4⁄5, after having identified 39 press titles. His spectator ratings are, on the other hand, accused of having been manipulated by the publication of false rave reviews
Louis Nadau of Marianne calls the film a turnip at 66 million euros, which he deplores the faulty writing, more concerned with commercial profitability than narrative coherence. The CinéSéries website is more severe: Written with one foot, shot with the other and edited with what remains, we wonder what Guillaume Canet did with his hands on this Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom
Hugues Dayez of RTBF judges the film pathétix The dialogues are pushy, the gags hackneyed, the brawl scenes muscled by digital special effects of repulsive ugliness
In Paris Match, Martin Stameschkine evokes an overly convoluted story, a glaring lack of rhythm and many sequences that fall flat. He considers that the duo formed by Guillaume Canet and Gilles Lellouche does not work, that Vincent Cassel as César misses his role and that the script, wobbly, lacks accuracy
Julien Rousset from Sud Ouest is also mixed: Despite funny winks at the time (Angèle, Orelsan, Zlatan Ibrahimović as guest stars), some scriptwriting finds (Asterix wants to cure his addiction to the magic potion), the whole seems smooth and wise compared, for example, to the joyful dinguerie of Alain Chabat in Mission Cleopatra
Caroline Vié of 20 minutes is more positive, praising in particular the performance of Gilles Lellouche: He embraces the role of Obelix with a palpable gluttony
For his part, Grégory Plouviez of the newspaper Le Parisien is mixed. Even if he believes that this new Asterix does not live up to the hopes placed in him, he notes that the film is not a turnip either. According to the journalist, the film is not unpleasant , but without great flavor and originality . In the same vein as his colleague of 20 Minutes, however, he welcomes the performance of Gilles Lellouche who manages to make Gerard Depardieu forget in the Obelix costume. No small feat
Conversely, David Fontaine, in The Canard enchaîné, laments that Gilles Lellouche desperately imitates Gerard Depardieu and calls the film honest entertainment but lacking verve and spiked with digital effects.where José Garcia, Jonathan Cohen and Philippe Katerine stand out from the crowd, facing a Zlatan in appearance
Within the film team, the actor Gilles Lellouche indicates that he was surprised and touched by the virulence of the critics towards this new opus of Asterix: All the films can be attacked and I hear the reasons why the film does not like. But the personal attacks on a family film, which is nothing like a scorcher, which has no other pretension than to entertain the greatest number, I do not understand them
Director: Guillaume Canet
Guillaume Canet, born on April 10, 1973 in Boulogne-Billancourt, is a French actor, director, screenwriter and film producer
He began his career in the theater, on television, before approaching his favorite field, cinema. His first successful film, The Beach (2000), made him known opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. In the 2000s, he also made a name for himself for Jeux d'enfants (2003) or Merry Christmas (2005). In parallel, he pursues a career as a director: from 1996, he turned to writing and directing short films then switched to feature films with My Idol in 2002, before knowing the consecration in 2006 with Don't tell Anyone for which he won the César award for best director
Guillaume Canet is also known for his passion for horses. A promising young rider, he stopped the discipline following a bad fall, for several years, before resuming show jumping competitions during the filming of Jappeloup, a biographical film about a great competition horse
Guillaume Canet was born on April 10, 1973 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, to a father from an old Nivernais and Parisian family, Philippe Canet, and an Oran mother pied-noir, Marie-Antoinette Cano. As his parents are horse breeders and own a stud farm in the Rambouillet region, he dreams of becoming a showjumping rider, but interrupts this professional career because of a fall at the age of eighteen. Indeed, during a competition, when he approaches an obstacle having planned several strides, the horse left a stride too early ; arrived at the entrance of the obstacle (oxer), the horse and its rider both fell and the horse got up on the young Duckling
After the shooting of the film Jappeloup, he regains a taste for horseback riding and show jumping competition. He participates in particular in the Gucci Masters events of the Paris Horse Show but also in many CSI (International Jumping Competitions) in Cannes, Le Mans, Fontainebleau, Chantilly and even in Oliva in Spain. Guillaume resumes without transition at a high level with his Pomme du Valon (French Saddle), Babèche and Sweet Boy d'alpa frames. Between 2012 and 2017, he participated in 623 show jumping events, winning 33 of them and brought in more than €66,500 in winnings. Among his best results: victories at the International Jumping of France, the Chantilly Jumping or the Paris Eiffel Jumping. He participates in professional show jumping events in competition, regularly rated at 1.50 m. Canet was appointed ambassador for the International Jumping of the Palace of Versailles in May 2017
Acting debut (1990s)Edit
Guillaume Canet photographed by the Harcourt studio in 2004
Passionate about comedy and dramatic art, Guillaume Canet enrolled in the Florent Course, then made a name for himself in the theater. He thus plays in the play The city whose prince is a child of Henry de Montherlant alongside Christophe Malavoy
After a few commercials for television and TV movies as well as television series, such as in the sitcom First Kisses where he played the role of Guillaume for about ten seconds, he made his first appearance in cinema, in 1995, in the short film The Only Son of Philippe Landoulsi
Two years later, he starred alongside actor Jean Rochefort in Philippe Haïm's thriller Barracuda, which earned him the acting prize at the International Festival of Young Directors of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1999. The same year, he was nominated for the César for the best male hope for En plein cœur (1998) by Pierre Jolivet. Guillaume Canet follows up with the filming of the comedy Je règle mon pas sur le pas de mon père by Rémi Waterhouse, in which he plays the role of Jean Yanne's son, before going abroad with Virginie Ledoyen to give the line to Leonardo DiCaprio in Danny Boyle's La Plage
The director Andrzej Żuławski then chose Guillaume Canet to play a reporter skinned alive in Fidelity (2000) with Sophie Marceau. Then he plays in Jerry Schatzberg's The day the ponies come back, in Antoine de Caunes' Bites of Dawn the following year, Pitof's fantastic thriller Vidocq and Pierre Jolivet's historical drama The Warrior's Brother
In 2001, Vidocq's commercial failure earned him a period of inactivity, which he used to write the script for My Idol, which became his first feature film as a director. This film, in which he offers his first film role to his wife, the former German model Diane Kruger, and of which he is also the associate producer, attracts in 2002 more than 500,000 spectators in French theaters
In 2003, he resumed his acting profession for the romantic-dramatic film Jeux d'enfants by Yann Samuell with Marion Cotillard, the comedy Narco by Gilles Lellouche and Tristan Aurouet, the drama Merry Christmas by Christian Carion, Hell by Danis Tanovic, A ticket to space by Eric Lartigau, etc
In 2006, he shot his second feature film, the thriller Don't tell anyone with François Cluzet (who won a César for his role) and Marie-Josée Croze, an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Harlan Coben translated into twenty-seven languages and sold more than six million copies worldwide. This film is an international success and in 2007 earned him the César award for best director (he has since been the youngest "Césarized" director in the history of the award and the Jacques Deray award
In September 2006, he was invited for the second time to take part in the jury of the official competition of the 32nd Deauville American film festival, chaired by Nicole Garcia
After Don't tell anyone, Guillaume Canet, directs and scripts The little handkerchiefs, released on October 20, 2010. The Little Handkerchiefs tells the story of a group of friends who are going to go on vacation although one of their own is between life and death following an accident. The film includes an advantageous cast with François Cluzet, Marion Cotillard, Benoit Magimel, Gilles Lellouche and Jean Dujardin. It is a great commercial success: almost 5.5 million spectators in theaters, the second best performance of the year 2010 in France (behind the 6 million of the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). A triumph despite the very divided criticism on the feature film
In 2011, after The New War of the Buttons by Thomas Langmann alongside Laetitia Casta and Kad Merad, he filmed with Leila Bekhti in the social drama A Better Life by Cédric Kahn, which was released in January of the following year, for which he obtained a male performance award at the Rome International Film Festival in October 2011
In February 2012, he is also on the poster of the sketch film The Infidels, with his friends Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche, and presides over the 37th César ceremony at the Châtelet theater, a ceremony which sees the coronation of The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius
The actor at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, for the out-of-competition presentation of Blood Ties
In 2013, Canet's fourth directorial achievement is the American remake of a French film, Blood Ties, directed by Jacques Maillot, and in which he played alongside François Cluzet. This is his first American film as a director, which has the title Blood Ties, starring Clive Owen, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis and Zoe Saldana. Blood Ties, which he writes with James Gray, is conceived as a tribute to American crime novels and series of the 1970s (The Godfather, Serpico, Kojak, etc.). The film was released in France on October 30, 2013, in March 2014 in the United States. It was presented out of competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. The attendance is low (less than 250,000 spectators in France), the critical reception is mediocre, most often citing an outdated, even corny thriller. The actor confides in 2017 that this financial and personal failure led him to a burn out
He concludes this year by being in the cast of the film Solo, a social drama about the Vendée Globe, with François Cluzet and Virginie Efira as main actors, released on November 6, 2013
The following year, he starred in a commissioned film: The Man we loved too Much, by André Téchiné, presented at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival out of competition, a drama based on the Agnès Le Roux affair, where he has Catherine Deneuve as his partner. He takes this incursion into the thriller further by then playing a serial killer in The next time I will aim for the heart, a psychological thriller by Cédric Anger which is selected in competition at the Angoulême Francophone film festival. Based on the Alain Lamare case, the feature film will be released on November 12, 2014
The actor is discreet in 2015. Only The Program, the British biopic directed by Stephen Frears about Lance Armstrong, is released on September 16, where he plays a secondary role: that of Michele Ferrari, the doctor who gave doping products to the cyclist
The year 2016 is marked by the release of several films, allowing him to reconnect with more positive and luminous universes: first an original project which he shares the poster with the rising star Charlotte Le Bon: the comedy The Secret of the Ice floes, Marie Madinier's first film, centered on Professor Quignard and his team who study PPM, a protein extracted from the king penguin with immunizing virtues. They are being followed in their research by an American team which, unlike them, has obtained authorization to conduct clinical tests on human subjects
In October, he is starring in Cézanne and Me, directed by Danièle Thompson, where the actor plays the writer Émile Zola opposite Guillaume Gallienne in the role of Paul Cézanne, for a dive into their friendship, in a nineteenth-century France. The reviews are very bad, and the box office does not exceed 500,000 admissions. The same month, the historical drama The Siege of Jadotville is released confidentially on Netflix, in which the English actor Jamie Dornan plays the Irishman Pat Quinlan, a commander who leads a stand-off with his troops against French and Belgian mercenaries in Congo in the early 1960s. Canet interprets his enemy, the Frenchman Falquez. The film was shot in the spring of 2015 in South Africa
In February 2017, he unveiled his fifth feature film, the autobiographical satire Rock'n'roll, with himself and his partner Marion Cotillard in the main roles, supported by a handful of stars, including the model Camille Rowe-Pourcheresse
In February 2017, he starts shooting the film The Big Bath directed by Gilles Lellouche
He then stages the sequel to the Little Handkerchiefs, We will finish together, released in May 2019
On September 25, 2019, he releases In the Name of the Earth, the film by Édouard Bergeon, son and grandson of farmers, which he produces and where he plays the main role, that of a farmer whom debts push to suicide. The film receives an excellent reception, it exceeds one million admissions after three weeks in theaters, especially in the rural world, but less in urban areas
In October 2019, he announced that he will be directing the next part of the adventures of Asterix and Obelix on the big screen, of which he will also play the main role (Asterix). He has plans to rejuvenate the cast and push the special effects more. Filming is interrupted in 2020 because of the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, so the release of Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom scheduled for 2022 is postponed to February 1, 2023
During the shutdown of the filming of Asterix, Canet shoots Him where he plays the main role of a musician out of inspiration; the film is released in October 2021
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