A film, so as not to forget Mix & Remix in your sketchbook

Five years after the death of the brilliant French-speaking press cartoonist, Frédéric Pajak evokes the man through the eyes of those who loved him.

The trailer for ‘The Friend: Portrait of Mix & Remix’.

Caravel Productions/Agora Films

December 19, 2016 is a day when Mix & Remix didn’t make anyone laugh. The famous French-speaking press cartoonist died at the age of 58 from pancreatic cancer. More than 5 years later, his friend and publisher Frédéric Pajak is releasing a film dedicated to him on May 4: “The friend: portrait of Mix & Remix”. It retraces the career of the man who left his native Saint-Maurice (VS) to come and make the artist in Lausanne, from his graphic debut on a musical background of the Dolce Vita until the revelation of his humorous genius. A success that will literally devour him.

There is a lot of emotion in the evocation of this course brutally interrupted and an enormous tenderness for the one whose real name was Philippe Becquelin. The nostalgia of the subject is counterbalanced by the laughter that always triggers the many drawings of Mix that dot the film. They marked the memories, but it is precisely so that one does not remember only them that Pajak wanted to make this film. “I thought about it almost immediately after his funeral, he tells us. I said to myself that the worst that could happen to Philippe is to be forgotten. I have edited several Mix books, including the latest recently, “The World According to Mix & Remix” and there is still material for many more. But I also wanted people to remember or know the man he was.

“The World According to Mix & Remix”

Ed. Drawn Notebooks

“This film is called ‘The Friend’ and not ‘My Friend’, because I have 30 people who were close to him testify. Everyone says something moving about Mix, he who was so modest, so polite. Everyone talks about the Mix he loved, whether it’s his wife and their two children, including his designer friends Noyau and Anna Sommer, his sisters Hélène and Laurence or even the journalist Antoine Duplan, who introduced him to ” The Weekly”. “I carried out interviews of an hour and a half with each one, to keep in the end only a few minutes. It was to be a film for television, it will also later be broadcast on RTS, but it was ruled out to be limited to 52 minutes. So the RTS told me okay, make a film of 1h20 and we will let you first exploit it in the cinema”.

“He was a nice guy”

By tracing the chronological journey of Mix, by listening to people talk to him about it, Frédéric Pajak himself discovered aspects that he did not know about his friend. “I knew he was close to his family, but I didn’t know what a good father he was. He was a great guy, that made him even more likeable to me. It made me cry, this movie. I also realized how important music was to him and his knowledge of it. It’s colossal everything he drew on the subject. I have 12,000 drawings of him and I will also prepare a book on Mix and music”.

What we also learn in this film is how much pressure the designer put on himself. From “L’Hebdo” to “Matin Dimanche”, via his collaborations with “Siné Hebdo” or the RTS program “Infrarouge”, he always wanted to do the best, could not say no when asked him for a drawing. He who was the watchman of the cathedral of Lausanne did not see the tragedy coming. And when he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he will be almost relieved: he was finally going to have an excuse not to crunch the news anymore. His last months, he will spend them returning to his first love, the return to graphic design, the line for the evocation of movement, no longer of laughter.

“Philippe is next to us”

“All this film, from the financing to the production, passing by the turning was like if I immersed myself in a bath of hot water, the same pleasant feeling, is almost surprised Pajak. It was obvious and everything took place in an extraordinary atmosphere. “We feel that Philippe is next to us,” his family told me after seeing the film.

“The Friend” is a documentary that touches you because it is indeed the portrait of a great guy. But he also reminds us that Mix & Remix was a major press cartoonist, one of the greatest and that we miss his sharp eye on the news. Terribly.