Dream job stunt woman: when mom comes home black on blue from work

It’s quite a journey to get from the Basilisk children’s circus to Hollywood with Tom Cruise in Minority Report. If only like a faceless consumable that flies through the air when it explodes. Immediately replaceable in the event of a breakdown due to an accident. Between the circus for the little ones and Hollywood was the Cirque du Soleil for the Basel stuntwoman Petra Sprecher, because many stuntwomen start their careers as performers like her. Have perfect body control. And power. And infinite courage to do so. Or maybe just the greatest serenity in the world.

Director Elena Avdija, born in Pristina and raised in the Jura, portrayed Petra together with Estelle and Virginie in the documentary “Cascadeuses – Stuntfrauen”. The French Virginie Arnaud has been a stuntwoman for almost 30 years, before that she worked as an artist in a Parisian cabaret, she was in Luc Besson’s “Lucy”, “Fast & Furious”, “RED” and no fewer than 250 other productions , today, in At an age she doesn’t want to reveal, she prefers working as a stunt coordinator, choreographing mass brawls or training her daughter, who also shows a certain affinity for getting beaten up professionally.

“Have you ever been scared?” asks the daughter. “For my life? Never. Not with the stunts,” replies the mother. When the daughter came home earlier, she often found her mother in black and blue at the stove. And Virginie often picked up her child from school wearing sunglasses. Where others would have suspected domestic violence, Virginie knew she was just going to work and that everything was fine.

When Virginie, Petra and France’s Estelle Piget – who was still in training at the time of filming – became stuntwomen, they had a very different view of what it meant to be. They thought of action scenes like those filmed by men. In which they double active heroines. Fly, defuse bombs, fight. Instead, they have to play victim. Women are beaten, suffocated, kicked, raped, murdered by men. And in high heels too. That irritates her. But it’s the mainstream now. In “CSI”, in “Tatort”, in thousands of other movies and series dealing with violence and crime.

We see Virginie as a prostitute who gets kicked in the stomach over and over. Estelle gets thrown down a flight of stairs, get up again, it’s okay, okay, her head is buzzing a bit and her legs are blue, but the scene isn’t over yet, she’s flying down the stairs a few more times. Petra tells her mother on the phone how she died in a shooting in “Westworld” otherwise she has nothing to do but it’s great to work for HBO, the total luxury, she doesn’t have to just fall on the floor, but on a really good exercise mat that looks like a marble floor.

From a career as Zoë Bell, probably the most famous stunt woman in the world, who has competed in all the Tarantino movies and who almost got Tarantino an entire movie with “Death Proof” in which she can play with her name and face, the three can only dream . They do a little. Petra herself would like to be in the spotlight.

Petra and Virginie share Zoë Bell’s love for super-fast cars, which they can train like horses so that car and woman grow together. And it is the best chance of employment in old age, when many things about your own body have already broken down. You can just sit and drive in the car. The car is like the office job for stunt people. If nothing else works, “Fast & Furious” still works.

They are fascinating, surreal insights into a kind of elite sport that already takes the breaking of bones into account. And in which some give their entire body art, which is confusingly similar to reality, so that the stars suffer and die as naturally as possible. The women know what they are getting into. What they gain, Estelle explains, is a wave of freedom: “It’s a liberating life. Knowing that you can jump from 70 meters. We’re having fun inside.”

“Cascadeuses” hits theaters November 17.