Terre des hommes, Vol de nuit, Courrier sud… Heroic life by Antoine de Saint-ExupéryThe story of Antoine Saint-Exupéry, so wonderfully told in his books, deserved to be dedicated to him in a film. In anticipation of the theatrical release of the biopic Saint-Ex by Pablo Aguero on December 11, a trailer has just been unveiled featuring Louis Garrel as the writer-aviator and Vincent Cassel as Henri Guillaumet, one of the pioneering pilots in the history of French aviation.

The screenplay for Saint-Ex takes us back to 1930, when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry sets out to find his friend and role model, Henri Guillaumet, who disappeared during a dangerous mission to fly over the Andes. In just a few seconds, the first extracts from the trailer highlight the competition between l’Aéropostale and traditional mail delivery methods such as rail and road. To prove the effectiveness of aviation in this field, the pioneers, Saint-Exupéry and Guillaumet, were prepared to take the wildest risks, flying over deserts and mountains, ignoring the unpredictable weather conditions of the time.

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Pablo Aguero’s film is partly adapted from Land of men (1939). In this autobiographical novel, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry recounts the rescue of his friend and mentor, Henri Guillaumet. The Argentinian director also drew on the genesis of The Little PrinceThe Little Prince”, in particular the meeting between Saint-Exupéry and two French girls living in Argentina. The scene multiplies references to the 1943 book, with the presence of numerous animals, including a fox and a snake, visible in the trailer. We learn that the aviator called these two young girls ” princesses of Argentina “ten years before the publication of this work, now considered a classic of French literature. ” It was a revelation, confides Pablo Aguero in the production notes. Before adding, I decided to interweave these two stories and these two narrative registers: the adventure film where we have to save Guillaumet and the poetic film about experiments.”

Far from being a blockbuster, Saint-Ex claims to be a “film intimate, with few characters, where wonder comes not from the ostentation of the means of production, but from the organic mystery of nature. “says the director. The two-year shoot took place in Argentina, from the summit of Aconcagua to that of Fitz Roy in the extreme south of Patagonia, to the foot of the Saint-Exupéry peak. Most of the film’s shots were taken in the dead of winter. Pablo Aguero’s aim was to “make the most of the winter. capture those twilight lights found only near the poles, and snowstorms whose grain no digital effect can reproduce. “.