Road movie off target
the stupendously good and affecting El Orfanato on his CV. He knows how to craft a scare or a Hitchcock reference just fine. It’s just that the script is too silly, too obviously ticking the boxes to ever give Bayona the opportunity to really turn the screws and take our breath away.
All I really took from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is proof – again – that all the money, onscreen talent and CGI wizardry in Hollywood doesn’t add up to a hill of beans without a decent story to tell and a reason to exist. The Leisure Seeker (M, 112 mins) Directed by Paolo Virzı` ★★★
True story. I was on the phone to my mum a month before she died.
After chatting happily for a while, she paused for a long moment and then said to me, ‘‘I want you to know something. You were always a terrible disappointment to me’’.
I was mortified, trying just to remind myself that Mum wasn’t always accurate in her recall these days, when she continued, ‘‘and I wish I had never married you’’.
Whether my mum thought she was talking to my dad or my stepdad, I have no idea. Dementia is like that. Occasionally hilarious, bruising, nuanced and deeply human.
Call me biased but I’ve only seen one film I reckon captured the mischievous hell of the condition, and that was Sarah Polley’s Away From Her in 2006, with Julie Christie and a truly beautiful script absolutely nailing it to the wall.
So good luck The Leisure Seeker, and thanks for coming.
The Leisure Seeker, with Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren as the requisite couple being torn apart by the cruelties of ageing, isn’t a bad effort.
It tries to entertain, the leads are wonderful and the setting – the roads from Boston to the Florida Keys – make for a spectacular backdrop.
The film is a pile up of cliched characters, screeds of expository dialogue and a general sense of striving too hard just to meet our expectations, when it should have been trying to confound them.
To its credit, Fallen Kingdom tries to break away from being nothing but a retread of what has gone before. And the monsters-inthe-house conceit is amusing, if not actually thrilling.
But as the credits rolled, I felt like I had been watching the pilot episode of a TV show, and not a feature film at all.
It’s just that between the wellexecuted set-up and the wildly telegraphed ending, The Leisure Seeker just hasn’t got much to say.
Sutherland and Mirren are John and Ella. He is losing his mind and she has cancer. Together, they decide to take one last road trip in their nicely decrepit 1975 Winnebago RV.
Along the way, as they head down-country to pay their respects at the Hemingway house in Key West, they will bicker and reconnect through a series of meetings and mis-adventures.
It’s a nice enough idea and I’m sure that Michael Zadoorian’s novel is a joy on the page. But novels are driven by the internal, and films have traditionally come a terrible cropper when they try to externalise what is occurring within a character’s mind.
Writer/director Paolo Virzı` is making his English-language debut here, and I can’t help but wonder if he hasn’t missed some cues and nuances in the source material.
The script puts some decent dialogue in the lead’s mouths, but also far too often descends into a syrupy and too-obvious recitation of all that stuff a couple of 50 years no longer need to explain to each other.
The Leisure Seeker didn’t anger me in the way that most cinema portrayals of dementia do. But neither did it engage me.
Come for Mirren and Sutherland’s performances and you won’t be disappointed, but don’t expect to be impressed by much else. public event is French film stalwart Jean-Pierre Bacri as the epically world-weary Max.
Max is confronted by a mutinous staff, an outbreak of food poisoning, an ultimatum from his lover, a photographer who resents no longer being a photo-journalist and a groom who treats his wife-tobe as another prop in a show in which he is determined to be the centre of attention.
The potential of C’est La Vie! is maybe a little diluted by the sheer size of the cast and the number of crises Max is confronted with. The tension and resulting hilarity never quite reach the jaw-dropping extremes of truly great farce.
Meanwhile, the script – which relies a lot on misunderstandings, double meanings and word-play for its laughs – is losing a bit via a strained shift from the subtitling crew. Crafting a decent joke is hard work. Crafting one that works in a second language must be damn near impossible. C’est La Vie! occasionally proves that inconvenient truth.
From the moment one of the Tamil kitchen hands casually mentions that he and his fellow workers are all musicians, the film’s most indelible scene becomes an inevitability.
As with the Earth, Wind and Fire-scored dance in Intouchables, Nakache and Toldano are happy to let the film serve as a vehicle for the democratising magic of music and the players who conjure it. The representation of a modern Europein-microcosm – most overt in this scene – is the kaupapa that gives C’est La Vie! its heart and soul.
C’est La Vie! starts a little tentatively, and a few of the many characterisations take a while to find themselves. But once the film hits its straps – which it definitely does –C’est La Vie! becomes a likeable, witty and occasionally downright poignant and insightful little gem. Recommended.