Is friendship the solution to the crisis of the couple?

Can a man and a woman be friends, live together and be a family, without falling in love? These are the questions posed Platonic, series created and produced by Elie Girard and Camille Rosset, selected at CanneSeries and available this Wednesday on OCS. The series follows Yann (Maxence Tual) and Elsa (Camille Rutherford), two friends who decide to leave their respective spouses to settle in a roommate. The even weeks, the duo appreciates rediscovered celibacy, the odd weeks, their children arrive… But can we succeed in forming a family with friends?

Yann, a 42-year-old botanist at the Bordeaux Botanical Garden, settled down young with his first girlfriend, Karen. But their daughter Mila has been the only glue in their couple for a while now. The quadra regularly complains to her best friend, Elsa, a 36-year-old Bordeaux photographer and mother of a little boy she had with Maxime, yet another one-night stand that finally became embedded in her life. . The starting point of ” Platonic was born watching another series,” says series co-creator Elie Girard that 20 minutes met during the Riviera festival.

A scene “where a friend went to see one of her friends and said to her: ‘You have to leave your boyfriend.’ We wondered: “Do we have the right to say that? To what extent can we intervene in the life of the other? Is it legitimate or are we damaging the relationship of friendship?” “, he summarizes. Unhappy as a couple, Elsa and Yann decide to leave their respective spouses and both move into a roommate following a conversation.

The representation of a new family schema

“The idea was to treat a friendship story as one would treat a love story. Friendship is a form of love, so we flirt with the genre of romantic comedy, wondering if these two people, best friends, a heterosexual man and woman, who get along so well that they will raise their children, together, will stop at friendship or not? What is friendship? Is it enough or not? We wanted to question all of this, ”continues Camille Rosset, co-creator of the series.

Platonic explores a fairly new configuration in French fiction, that of two adults, separated or divorced, friends, who decide to have a family when they are not in a relationship. Yann and Elsa’s children do not know each other. “We built our season around joint custody: one episode out of two, there are the children, one episode out of two, they are not there to show the schizophrenia of these two parents, says Camille Rosset. There is something quite classic about joint custody and how these two children find themselves half-brother and half-sister by marriage… Except that their parents are not together. So it creates confusion for them. »

The deconstruction of clichés around gender

With Elsa and Yann, the two authors question norms and “crash-test another model of life”. By separating from his wife, the daddy hen Yann will finally get out of his comfort zone and will understand that he has missed out on a lot of things: “Yann is a man who has not yet had an orgasm , who is not comfortable in his sexuality,” says Elie Girard.

For her part, Elsa does not have the maternal instinct and prefers to entrust her kid to her roommate rather than take care of it. “Elsa behaves like a father oldschoolthat is to say as someone who does not know exactly how to weave a relationship with his offspring, his son in this case, ”he underlines.

“There was a real desire to take motherhood out of the codes of representation that are imposed on both men and women, so make a less virile man and a woman who has difficulties with her motherhood, who is not necessarily a good mother. It was important for us to explore that,” explains Camille Rosset. And to explain: “Elsa is very admiring of her father, a photographer like her, except that he is a great war photographer. She would like to look like him but she is a woman and it’s another time. Maybe it’s finally time for Elsa to kill the father, in order to find her place as a mother?

“We were interested in taking these two shots and reversing them to see what it caused. These are good narrative engines and then, this allows us to instill reflections on the themes that interest us: sexuality, gender, family, ”adds Elie Girard. Because, beyond the romantic comedy and the question: “Are Yann and Elsa going to succeed in not ending up together?”, Platonic proposes, without judging, other representations of gender, masculinity, motherhood, sexuality and family. A fairly new approach in French fiction which nevertheless corresponds to a sociological reality. “There are a lot of configurations that fiction will have to address: forming a family with three parents, forming a family in homoparental couples… It is already very present in our society and fiction does not explore this very much”, concludes Elie Girard. .