The Roads Not Taken

In cinemas on Friday

TENET did rather well on its opening weekend, but cinema workers are desperate for a crowd-pleaser to bring punters back to the big screen. While Orlando director Sally Potter’s new dementia drama is heart-felt, no-one in their right mind would recommend it as a post-lockdown night out.

Javier Bardem is Leo, a writer living with a chronic brain disorder.

He’s confused, inarticulate and a source of constant worry for his saintly daughter Molly (Elle Fanning).

But, perhaps selfishly, he has refused to move out of his Brooklyn bachelor pad or accept professional help.

Potter, whose brother had early-onset dementia, sets her film over one grim day that begins with Molly arriving to take Leo to the dentist and the optometrist

As she has a crunch lunchtime meeting at work, they need to be quick. But her plan soon unravels.

Leo is too far gone. After he wets his pants, snatches a stranger’s dog and jumps out of a moving taxi she realises she was being foolishly optimistic. Between the disasters, Potter throws us into Leo’s mind as he imagines living with a past girlfriend (Salma Hayek) in his native Mexico and farting around on a Greek island. On paper, this probably looked like a clever idea, but the execution is fatally muddled. It’s never clear if these are dreary flashbacks or glimpses of parallel universes. Fanning and Bardem give their all, and Laura Linney livens things up in a brief appearance as Molly’s mum and Leo’s bitter ex-wife. But Potter refuses to let a chink of light into her plodding drama.

There is no pay-off and we are offered little insight into this heartbreaking condition.

Leo simply needs to be in a home – and as that becomes painfully obvious in the first five minutes, the film is left with nowhere to go.