Rodrigue in Love

Stéphane is an actor out of work. To get by he reluctantly agrees to rejoin his old company for a run at the Avignon theatre festival. There he meets Fanny, a former colleague, who is playing the lead in a Victor Hugo classic. To impress her he tells a lie: that he is playing Rodrigue in Corneille's Le Cid, which happens to be her favourite play. The lie grows and before long he has to actually go on. Johann Dionnet writes and directs in his first feature. Baptiste Lecaplain plays Stéphane, with Alison Wheeler, Lyès Salem and Elisa Erka. The source is his own short film. Dionnet wrote Je joue Rodrigue in 2019, out of the years he spent at the Avignon festival. The world of the film is real. Every July in Avignon thousands of companies hand out flyers in the street, hundreds of plays run at once, and most of them play to empty rooms; the narrative uses that crowd directly as material. The humour comes from the profession: the compliments actors pay each other, the arithmetic of audience numbers, and the search for work sit at the centre. It won three awards including the grand prize at the 2025 Alpe d'Huez film festival and opened on 18 June 2025. Who it is for: viewers who like French romantic comedy and films about the theatre. Who it is not for: the shape built on a lie is familiar, the ending is predictable, and some jokes are lost without the theatrical references.