Layer of meta (fiction), your hat and your mask, let’s play Zorro, let’s play with Zorro. “Without offending Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power or Antonio Banderas, there is one Zorro who surpasses them in the collective memory, the one played by Guy Williams for the Walt Disney studios, from 1957 to 1961. It was he who appeared out of the night,” ridiculed the pot-bellied Sergeant Garcia and punished the cruel Commander Monastorio, with the help of his mute servant Bernardo.
In this black-and-white microcosm (literally and figuratively, in this colonial California, the good guys are perfect and the bad guys are infamous), Benjamin Charbit and Noé Debré multiply their experiences. They age the masked avenger by two decades at a time, marry him, give him political responsibilities and burden him with financial worries. Of course, there will be sword fights and nocturnal rides, but most of the energy – considerable – expended on this project feeds, not the legend of the liberator, but the story of his midlife crisis.
languid rhythm
Representing the era of regrets and doubts, this Zorro necessarily loses its energy. The languid rhythm of the series, the melancholy that inhabits the main characters sometimes brutally contradict the burlesque of the situations, producing an incongruous object, sometimes disconcerting, often charming.
It’s 1821 Los Angeles. Don Diego de la Vega (Jean Dujardin) is preparing to succeed his father (André Dussollier) as mayor of the fledgling city. The amiable dreamer has become a kindly landowner brimming with good intentions that he struggles to put into practice. His wife, Doña Gabriela (Audrey Dana), looks at Don Diego with pity and exasperation.
The portrait of this man without many qualities has barely been sketched when Los Angeles falls under the financial control of Don Emmanuel (Eric Elmosnino), who shamelessly practices the exploitation of the indigenous masses. A little reluctantly, Don Diego takes the black coat out of the mothballs in which Bernardo (Salvatore Ficarra) had kept it. If this resurrection allows for pieces of courage, it allows above all this version of Zorro to draw an original geometric figure, the triangle with two vertices. Realizing the emotion that Zorro arouses in his wife, Don Diego’s masked double seduces his own wife.
The burlesque dramaturgy established from the opening sequences eliminates the need to ask embarrassing questions (Is Doña Gabriela blind or misunderstood, for example)? These jokes, which see antagonists running after each other up a double flight of stairs with the gusto of the Keystone Cops of old, or the hero being treated like a pile of dirty laundry by well-meaning accomplices, have Zoro an old-fashioned and heady aroma.
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