Synopsis

Toscan... No need to introduce him to his 'film family' that still sorely misses him seven years after his demise. From the very day he passed away, the idea was born to remember, secure and recapture the spark that had been snuffed out so abruptly. A portrait of Toscan... But who could bring back to life his free, and free-flowing, speech -- funny, sometimes cheeky, always brilliant and never conventional? Who could bring back to life his lightning-quick thought process, always on the lookout? Who could bring back to life that tremor of his nostril, that fraction of a second when a thought comes together before it shoots out like an arrow? Who? No one but the man himself. Toscan by Toscan. Using hundreds of interviews with him over a period of almost 30 years, I have tried to reconstruct the puzzle of this extraordinarily true-to-itself thought process that sprang from a real culture with which he irrigated all fields of filmmaking, underneath his guise as a flamboyant troubadour celebrating art and life as if it were all a party. Watching the overall picture emerge of a humanist whose verbal virtuosity never completely masked his capacity for emotion, his vertiginous doubt, his bottomless gravity, his 'difficulty of being', yet despite it all, his faith in Man and the power of love above and beyond everything. The density of his discourse, the sharpness of his repartee, the richness of content, the diversity of the topics he tackled, the speed and accuracy of his analytical power, the elegance of form combined with the extreme clarity of his speech that was marked by an extraordinary, euphoria-inducing vitality, lift one up as on a tidal wave. The energy, enthusiasm, humor and indomitable conviction that drove him should fascinate, delight, move, enlighten, surprise, help, fill with wonder, while making one think, way beyond the professional context that was his, in an era that truly needs it.