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Oct 31, 2007
"L'équipier" : forward to the past, boldly. (3/5)
« L’équipier » is a junk yard sale of a film, in which undiscriminating, wet-eyed nostalgia is expected to grace the most worthless piece of the past with undue monetary and sentimental value.
The film belongs to that expanding line of French films, so numerous they threaten to become a full-blown genre, which, rooted in the 20th century, mellow and cry over the good old times.
« L’équipier » is not unlike -but much worse than- « Les enfants du marais », where the final shot of the supermarket which has replaced the marsh plays the same role as the flashback in Lioret’s film.
Grégori Dérangère’s Antoine is a near twin brother to Jacques Gamblin’s Garris, a WW1 veteran, who settled in the marsh to come to terms with his war experience and avoid the company of men.
Antoine left Algeria morally and physically crippled -a badly injured hand, which plays like one more cliché- and chose to isolate himself in a lighthouse, off an island itself off Finistère, i.e finis terrae, i.e. where land ends.
More than forty years after the fact, as Antoine reveals his « secret », torture in Algeria pops up in « L’équipier » like a fashionable, politically correct and totally innocuous psychological gimmick.
« Les enfants du marais » and « L’équipier » shout it in one voice : war is ugly ; most men are evil ; nature is sometimes harsh and cruel, but always fair and soothing.
Such « truths » deserve to be repeated tirelessly ? If so, with a minimum of talent.
Why did I watch « L’équipier » ? Fair question. Three reasons :
1-the scarcity of alternate choices,
2-Sandrine Bonnaire ages gracefully and usually does an excellent job choosing her parts (but « nobody’s perfect »),
3-I felt like watching seascapes.
According to « Allocine », the media and viewers gave the film an average *** review ; stars no doubt come cheaper and cheaper.
Even « Les cahiers du cinéma » and « Le monde » granted the movie one *, probably to be shared among the three main actors who dutifully do their part to try and salvage the « galère » (galley) they have inadvertently boarded, unless they wished to acknowledge the film sociological value.
About worthless as a film, « L’équipier » tells significantly more about France than the pathetic lack of creativity of its cinema.
The movie offers a bleak picture of the country itself, as it stood, or rather did not stand, in 2004, buried in nostalgia for the greener pastures and marshes and islands of the previous century.
« L’équipier » was ostrich filmmaking for an ostrich audience, all heads safely hidden in the past and in movie theatres dark and warm like a mother’s womb.
The man who said « Pschitt », Jacques Chirac, was then at the helm of a state which had entered the third millennium looking boldly backward into the second.
Hyperactive or merely excited -suit yourselves- Nicolas Sarkozy has since become president of France.
Will his equally heralded and derided energy change the face of French cinema ? Will he boost creativity and imagination ? Are we in for daring Science Fiction projects rather than a few more leisurely walks in the countryside ? Shall Christian Clavier, Sarkozy’s clone -or is it the other way around ?- soon star in French « SuperDupont » blockbuster ?
Or will the Sarkozy era only spawn high-brow documentary films about the physical and intellectual consequences of too much jogging, directed by Alain Finkelkraut, the French Michael Moore ? And French cinema promptly return to its diet of nostalgia pieces, like to comfortable old clothes or even a second skin, only screening them at higher speed ?
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