Everything seems to be going well on board the Dubaï-Paris of European Airlines. In the cockpit, the pilots are getting ready to eat while the stewardesses make sure that the passengers stay in their seats when approaching an area of turbulence. A passenger stands up. The recordings of the conversations in the cockpit begin to crackle. Panic on board. The plane crashes in the Alps without anyone knowing why.
So begins the new film by Frenchman Yann Gozlan, “Black Box”, an aerial thriller starring Pierre Niney, Lou de Laâge and André Dussollier which will be released on Friday April 29 in New York (Village East by Angelika) and May 6 in Los Angeles. (Laemmle Glendale). The first plays the role of Mathieu Vasseur, a brilliant acoustician from the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA), the body responsible in France for shedding light on the circumstances of plane crashes. He is in particular responsible for making the black box of the device speak, which contains the sound recordings in the cockpit and the technical data from the flight instruments. But as he peers into the recordings with his super-fine hearing, he discovers that the reasons for the crash are more complex than he thought. His quest for truth turns to conspiracy, even paranoia, at least in the eyes of those around him. Suspended, he embarks on his own investigation to elucidate the mystery.
The work of the investigators at the heart of the film
For lovers of aerial thrillers like “Flight” (a drunken pilot who saves almost all of his passengers from certain death in a plummeting plane) or “Sully” (the true story of US Airways Flight 1549 which landed on the Hudson in 2009), “Black Box” is a must. Fine and realistic, it gives an unknown facet of plane crashes. Instead of focusing on pilots or passengers or even air traffic controllers and families (like “Aftermath”, about a father trying to identify the air traffic controller responsible for the plane crash that killed his daughter), it highlights the painstaking work of the investigators who reconstruct the last minutes of the flight. ” Civil aviation is a fascinating universe that brings together players – pilots, airlines, investigators – with contradictory interests. It’s a microcosm that is rarely shown in air disaster films. It’s an original film arena where conflict and drama can arise.emphasizes Yann Gozlan.
Nominated five times for the César in 2021, the film required years of work for the Frenchman, to whom we owe “An ideal man” (with Pierre Niney already) and “Burn out”. He worked together with the BEA in writing the screenplay and during filming to make the fiction as realistic as possible, going so far as to film in the organization’s laboratory at Le Bourget where the black boxes are traditionally open.
During his immersions in this government agency renowned in the world of civil aviation for its competence, he noted the language, the codes and the gestures used by the investigators. Pierre Niney also spent time there to prepare for his role. During a visit, the actor met a member of the BEA with a profile very similar to the character of Mathieu Vasseur, a young man devoted to his work, uncomfortable in society. The artist would have asked to film him to study his expressions and his movements in front of his workstation.
The black box, a “phantasmagoric” object
In addition, the BEA made available to Yann Gozlan the transcripts of recordings and videos of the opening of black boxes (which are actually orange to be easily identifiable), in particular that of Air France’s Rio-Paris which plunged into the Atlantic in 2009 with 228 souls on board. This secret process, in the presence of several actors involved in the incident, can last for hours in real life. In the film, he is only a few minutes long. But the scene, which looks like an open heart operation or an autopsy, is certainly one of the highlights of the work. ” I believe the opening of black boxes has never really been shown in a movieobserve Yann Gozlan. The black box is a spooky object. As soon as there is a crash, the journalists tell us about it, without us really knowing what reality they correspond to. We don’t even know what they look like. I wanted to put this object at the center of a story of investigation ».
In the manner of “Song of the Wolf”, an action film centered on the “golden ear” which analyzes external noises in submarines to identify possible threats, the sound occupies a part important part of the “black box”. It is omnipresent during the analysis of the recordings but also in the scenes where Mathieu struggles with his own hearing problems – he is assailed by tinnitus and hyperacusis, an ailment characterized by hypersensitivity to surrounding sounds.
Yann Gozlan uses this rich sound dimension to involve the viewer in the investigation. ” The sound recordings in the cockpits are often of poor quality because the ambient microphones used are also poor. This may come as a surprise because the devices around the pilots are more and more sophisticated. It is also sufficient that there is turbulence or that the signal is altered at the time of the crash for the recordings to be degraded. As a result, when we analyze a recording, we can hear two different things, he said. It creates something interesting on a dramatic level. The worse the recordings are, the more active we as viewers become. Like the investigators, we want to listen carefully to try to distinguish the words and understand what happened on this plane. ».
–
